English

Finitely (In)tractable Promise Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Computational Complexity 2025-06-09 v2 Logic

Abstract

The Promise Constraint Satisfaction Problem (PCSP) is a generalization of the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) that includes approximation variants of satisfiability and graph coloring problems. Barto [LICS '19] has shown that a specific PCSP, the problem to find a valid Not-All-Equal solution to a 1-in-3-SAT instance, is not finitely tractable in that it can be solved by a trivial reduction to a tractable CSP, but such a CSP is necessarily over an infinite domain (unless P=NP). We initiate a systematic study of this phenomenon by giving a general necessary condition for finite tractability and characterizing finite tractability within a class of templates - the "basic" tractable cases in the dichotomy theorem for symmetric Boolean PCSPs allowing negations by Brakensiek and Guruswami [SODA'18].

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.04618,
  title  = {Finitely (In)tractable Promise Constraint Satisfaction Problems},
  author = {Kristina Asimi and Libor Barto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.04618},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:12:42.572Z