arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Joanna Ochremiak.
We investigate the isomorphism problem in the setting of definable sets (equivalent to sets with atoms): given two definable relational structures, are they related by a definable isomorphism? Under mild assumptions on the underlying structure of atoms, we prove decidability of the problem. The core result is parameter-elimination: existence of an isomorphism definable with parameters implies existence of an isomorphism definable without parameters.
We consider families of symmetric linear programs (LPs) that decide a property of graphs (or other relational structures) in the sense that, for each size of graph, there is an LP defining a polyhedral lift that separates the integer points corresponding to graphs with the property from those corresponding to graphs without the property. We show that this is equivalent, with at most polynomial blow-up in size, to families of symmetric Boolean circuits with threshold gates. In particular, when we consider polynomial-size LPs, the model is equivalent to definability in a non-uniform version of fixed-point logic with counting (FPC). Known upper and lower bounds for FPC apply to the non-uniform version. In particular, this implies that the class of graphs with perfect matchings has polynomial-size symmetric LPs while we obtain an exponential lower bound for symmetric LPs for the class of Hamiltonian graphs. We compare and contrast this with previous results (Yannakakis 1991) showing that any symmetric LPs for the matching and TSP polytopes have exponential size. As an application, we establish that for random, uniformly distributed graphs, polynomial-size symmetric LPs are as powerful as general Boolean circuits. We illustrate the effect of this on the well-studied planted-clique problem.
We analyse how the standard reductions between constraint satisfaction problems affect their proof complexity. We show that, for the most studied propositional, algebraic, and semi-algebraic proof systems, the classical constructions of pp-interpretability, homomorphic equivalence and addition of constants to a core preserve the proof complexity of the CSP. As a result, for those proof systems, the classes of constraint languages for which small unsatisfiability certificates exist can be characterised algebraically. We illustrate our results by a gap theorem saying that a constraint language either has resolution refutations of constant width, or does not have bounded-depth Frege refutations of subexponential size. The former holds exactly for the widely studied class of constraint languages of bounded width. This class is also known to coincide with the class of languages with refutations of sublinear degree in Sums-of-Squares and Polynomial Calculus over the real-field, for which we provide alternative proofs. We then ask for the existence of a natural proof system with good behaviour with respect to reductions and simultaneously small size refutations beyond bounded width. We give an example of such a proof system by showing that bounded-degree Lovász-Schrijver satisfies both requirements. Finally, building on the known lower bounds, we demonstrate the applicability of the method of reducibilities and construct new explicit hard instances of the graph 3-coloring problem for all studied proof systems.
We study the problem of eliminating recursion from monadic datalog programs on trees with an infinite set of labels. We show that the boundedness problem, i.e., determining whether a datalog program is equivalent to some nonrecursive one is undecidable but the decidability is regained if the descendant relation is disallowed. Under similar restrictions we obtain decidability of the problem of equivalence to a given nonrecursive program. We investigate the connection between these two problems in more detail.
The paper presents an algebraic framework for optimization problems expressible as Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problems. Our results generalize the algebraic framework for the decision version (CSPs) provided by Bulatov et al. [SICOMP 2005]. We introduce the notions of weighted algebras and varieties and use the Galois connection due to Cohen et al. [SICOMP 2013] to link VCSP languages to weighted algebras. We show that the difficulty of VCSP depends only on the weighted variety generated by the associated weighted algebra. Paralleling the results for CSPs we exhibit a reduction to cores and rigid cores which allows us to focus on idempotent weighted varieties. Further, we propose an analogue of the Algebraic CSP Dichotomy Conjecture; prove the hardness direction and verify that it agrees with known results for VCSPs on two-element sets [Cohen et al. 2006], finite-valued VCSPs [Thapper and Zivny 2013] and conservative VCSPs [Kolmogorov and Zivny 2013].