Daniel Z. Lee | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

On zeros and algorithms for disordered systems: mean-field spin glasses

Spin glasses are fundamental probability distributions at the core of statistical physics, the theory of average-case computational complexity, and modern high-dimensional statistical inference. In the mean-field setting, we design deterministic quasipolynomial-time algorithms for estimating the partition function to arbitrarily high accuracy for all inverse temperatures in the second moment regime. In particular, for the Sherrington--Kirkpatrick model, our algorithms succeed for the entire replica-symmetric phase. To achieve this, we study the locations of the zeros of the partition function. Notably, our methods are conceptually simple, and apply equally well to the spherical case and the case of Ising spins.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2025

Sparsifying Cayley Graphs on Every Group

A classic result in graph theory, due to Batson, Spielman, and Srivastava (STOC 2009) shows that every graph admits a $(1 \pm \varepsilon)$ cut (or spectral) sparsifier which preserves only $O(n / \varepsilon^2)$ reweighted edges. However, when applying this result to \emph{Cayley graphs}, the resulting sparsifier is no longer necessarily a Cayley graph -- it can be an arbitrary subset of edges. Thus, a recent line of inquiry, and one which has only seen minor progress, asks: for any group $G$, do all Cayley graphs over the group $G$ admit sparsifiers which preserve only $\mathrm{polylog}(|G|)/\varepsilon^2$ many re-weighted generators? As our primary contribution, we answer this question in the affirmative, presenting a proof of the existence of such Cayley graph spectral sparsifiers, along with an efficient algorithm for finding them. Our algorithm even extends to \emph{directed} Cayley graphs, if we instead ask only for cut sparsification instead of spectral sparsification. We additionally study the sparsification of linear equations over non-abelian groups. In contrast to the abelian case, we show that for non-abelian valued equations, super-polynomially many linear equations must be preserved in order to approximately preserve the number of satisfied equations for any input. Together with our Cayley graph sparsification result, this provides a formal separation between Cayley graph sparsification and sparsifying linear equations.

cs.DS↗