English

SOS lower bounds with hard constraints: think global, act local

Data Structures and Algorithms 2018-09-06 v1 Computational Complexity

Abstract

Many previous Sum-of-Squares (SOS) lower bounds for CSPs had two deficiencies related to global constraints. First, they were not able to support a "cardinality constraint", as in, say, the Min-Bisection problem. Second, while the pseudoexpectation of the objective function was shown to have some value β\beta, it did not necessarily actually "satisfy" the constraint "objective = β\beta". In this paper we show how to remedy both deficiencies in the case of random CSPs, by translating \emph{global} constraints into \emph{local} constraints. Using these ideas, we also show that degree-Ω(n)\Omega(\sqrt{n}) SOS does not provide a (43ϵ)(\frac{4}{3} - \epsilon)-approximation for Min-Bisection, and degree-Ω(n)\Omega(n) SOS does not provide a (1112+ϵ)(\frac{11}{12} + \epsilon)-approximation for Max-Bisection or a (54ϵ)(\frac{5}{4} - \epsilon)-approximation for Min-Bisection. No prior SOS lower bounds for these problems were known.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.01207,
  title  = {SOS lower bounds with hard constraints: think global, act local},
  author = {Pravesh Kothari and Ryan O'Donnell and Tselil Schramm},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.01207},
  year   = {2018}
}