English

Approximate counting CSP seen from the other side

Computational Complexity 2020-05-15 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

In this paper we study the complexity of counting Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) of the form #CSP(C\mathcal{C},-), in which the goal is, given a relational structure A\mathbf{A} from a class C\mathcal{C} of structures and an arbitrary structure B\mathbf{B}, to find the number of homomorphisms from A\mathbf{A} to B\mathbf{B}. Flum and Grohe showed that #CSP(C\mathcal{C},-) is solvable in polynomial time if C\mathcal{C} has bounded treewidth [FOCS'02]. Building on the work of Grohe [JACM'07] on decision CSPs, Dalmau and Jonsson then showed that, if C\mathcal{C} is a recursively enumerable class of relational structures of bounded arity, then assuming FPT \neq #W[1], there are no other cases of #CSP(C\mathcal{C},-) solvable exactly in polynomial time (or even fixed-parameter time) [TCS'04]. We show that, assuming FPT \neq W[1] (under randomised parametrised reductions) and for C\mathcal{C} satisfying certain general conditions, #CSP(C\mathcal{C},-) is not solvable even approximately for C\mathcal{C} of unbounded treewidth; that is, there is no fixed parameter tractable (and thus also not fully polynomial) randomised approximation scheme for #CSP(C\mathcal{C},-). In particular, our condition generalises the case when C\mathcal{C} is closed under taking minors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.07922,
  title  = {Approximate counting CSP seen from the other side},
  author = {Andrei A. Bulatov and Stanislav Zivny},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.07922},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Full version of an MFCS'19 paper

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:24:03.442Z