Removing Additive Structure in 3SUM-Based Reductions

Abstract

Our work explores the hardness of $3$SUM instances without certain additive structures, and its applications. As our main technical result, we show that solving $3$SUM on a size-$n$ integer set that avoids solutions to $a+b=c+d$ for $\{a, b\} \ne \{c, d\}$ still requires $n^{2-o(1)}$ time, under the $3$SUM hypothesis. Such sets are called Sidon sets and are well-studied in the field of additive combinatorics. - Combined with previous reductions, this implies that the All-Edges Sparse Triangle problem on $n$-vertex graphs with maximum degree $\sqrt{n}$ and at most $n^{k/2}$ $k$-cycles for every $k \ge 3$ requires $n^{2-o(1)}$ time, under the $3$SUM hypothesis. This can be used to strengthen the previous conditional lower bounds by Abboud, Bringmann, Khoury, and Zamir [STOC'22] of $4$-Cycle Enumeration, Offline Approximate Distance Oracle and Approximate Dynamic Shortest Path. In particular, we show that no algorithm for the $4$-Cycle Enumeration problem on $n$-vertex $m$-edge graphs with $n^{o(1)}$ delays has $O(n^{2-\varepsilon})$ or $O(m^{4/3-\varepsilon})$ pre-processing time for $\varepsilon >0$. We also present a matching upper bound via simple modifications of the known algorithms for $4$-Cycle Detection. - A slight generalization of the main result also extends the result of Dudek, Gawrychowski, and Starikovskaya [STOC'20] on the $3$SUM hardness of nontrivial 3-Variate Linear Degeneracy Testing (3-LDTs): we show $3$SUM hardness for all nontrivial 4-LDTs. The proof of our main technical result combines a wide range of tools: Balog-Szemer{\'e}di-Gowers theorem, sparse convolution algorithm, and a new almost-linear hash function with almost $3$-universal guarantee for integers that do not have small-coefficient linear relations.