69 research outputs found
Exponential Time Complexity of the Permanent and the Tutte Polynomial
We show conditional lower bounds for well-studied #P-hard problems:
(a) The number of satisfying assignments of a 2-CNF formula with n variables
cannot be counted in time exp(o(n)), and the same is true for computing the
number of all independent sets in an n-vertex graph.
(b) The permanent of an n x n matrix with entries 0 and 1 cannot be computed
in time exp(o(n)).
(c) The Tutte polynomial of an n-vertex multigraph cannot be computed in time
exp(o(n)) at most evaluation points (x,y) in the case of multigraphs, and it
cannot be computed in time exp(o(n/polylog n)) in the case of simple graphs.
Our lower bounds are relative to (variants of) the Exponential Time
Hypothesis (ETH), which says that the satisfiability of n-variable 3-CNF
formulas cannot be decided in time exp(o(n)). We relax this hypothesis by
introducing its counting version #ETH, namely that the satisfying assignments
cannot be counted in time exp(o(n)). In order to use #ETH for our lower bounds,
we transfer the sparsification lemma for d-CNF formulas to the counting
setting
Fine-grained dichotomies for the Tutte plane and Boolean #CSP
Jaeger, Vertigan, and Welsh [15] proved a dichotomy for the complexity of
evaluating the Tutte polynomial at fixed points: The evaluation is #P-hard
almost everywhere, and the remaining points admit polynomial-time algorithms.
Dell, Husfeldt, and Wahl\'en [9] and Husfeldt and Taslaman [12], in combination
with Curticapean [7], extended the #P-hardness results to tight lower bounds
under the counting exponential time hypothesis #ETH, with the exception of the
line , which was left open. We complete the dichotomy theorem for the
Tutte polynomial under #ETH by proving that the number of all acyclic subgraphs
of a given -vertex graph cannot be determined in time unless
#ETH fails.
Another dichotomy theorem we strengthen is the one of Creignou and Hermann
[6] for counting the number of satisfying assignments to a constraint
satisfaction problem instance over the Boolean domain. We prove that all
#P-hard cases are also hard under #ETH. The main ingredient is to prove that
the number of independent sets in bipartite graphs with vertices cannot be
computed in time unless #ETH fails. In order to prove our results,
we use the block interpolation idea by Curticapean [7] and transfer it to
systems of linear equations that might not directly correspond to
interpolation.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur
The Parity of Set Systems under Random Restrictions with Applications to Exponential Time Problems
Approximately counting and sampling small witnesses using a colourful decision oracle
In this paper, we prove "black box" results for turning algorithms which decide whether or not a witness exists into algorithms to approximately count the number of witnesses, or to sample from the set of witnesses approximately uniformly, with essentially the same running time. We do so by extending the framework of Dell and Lapinskas (STOC 2018), which covers decision problems that can be expressed as edge detection in bipartite graphs given limited oracle access; our framework covers problems which can be expressed as edge detection in arbitrary k-hypergraphs given limited oracle access. (Simulating this oracle generally corresponds to invoking a decision algorithm.) This includes many key problems in both the fine-grained setting (such as k-SUM, k-OV and weighted k-Clique) and the parameterised setting (such as induced subgraphs of size k or weight-k solutions to CSPs). From an algorithmic standpoint, our results will make the development of new approximate counting algorithms substantially easier; indeed, it already yields a new state-of-the-art algorithm for approximately counting graph motifs, improving on Jerrum and Meeks (JCSS 2015) unless the input graph is very dense and the desired motif very small. Our k-hypergraph reduction framework generalises and strengthens results in the graph oracle literature due to Beame et al. (ITCS 2018) and Bhattacharya et al. (CoRR abs/1808.00691)
Nearly optimal independence oracle algorithms for edge estimation in hypergraphs
We study a query model of computation in which an n-vertex k-hypergraph can
be accessed only via its independence oracle or via its colourful independence
oracle, and each oracle query may incur a cost depending on the size of the
query. In each of these models, we obtain oracle algorithms to approximately
count the hypergraph's edges, and we unconditionally prove that no oracle
algorithm for this problem can have significantly smaller worst-case oracle
cost than our algorithms
Modular Counting of Subgraphs: Matchings, Matching-Splittable Graphs, and Paths
We systematically investigate the complexity of counting subgraph patterns
modulo fixed integers. For example, it is known that the parity of the number
of -matchings can be determined in polynomial time by a simple reduction to
the determinant. We generalize this to an -time algorithm to
compute modulo the number of subgraph occurrences of patterns that are
vertices away from being matchings. This shows that the known
polynomial-time cases of subgraph detection (Jansen and Marx, SODA 2015) carry
over into the setting of counting modulo .
Complementing our algorithm, we also give a simple and self-contained proof
that counting -matchings modulo odd integers is Mod_q-W[1]-complete and
prove that counting -paths modulo is Parity-W[1]-complete, answering an
open question by Bj\"orklund, Dell, and Husfeldt (ICALP 2015).Comment: 23 pages, to appear at ESA 202
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