Stronger 3-SUM Lower Bounds for Approximate Distance Oracles via Additive Combinatorics

The "short cycle removal" technique was recently introduced by Abboud, Bringmann, Khoury and Zamir (STOC '22) to prove fine-grained hardness of approximation. Its main technical result is that listing all triangles in an $n^{1/2}$-regular graph is $n^{2-o(1)}$-hard under the 3-SUM conjecture even when the number of short cycles is small; namely, when the number of $k$-cycles is $O(n^{k/2+\gamma})$ for $\gamma<1/2$. Abboud et al. achieve $\gamma\geq 1/4$ by applying structure vs. randomness arguments on graphs. In this paper, we take a step back and apply conceptually similar arguments on the numbers of the 3-SUM problem. Consequently, we achieve the best possible $\gamma=0$ and the following lower bounds under the 3-SUM conjecture: * Approximate distance oracles: The seminal Thorup-Zwick distance oracles achieve stretch $2k\pm O(1)$ after preprocessing a graph in $O(m n^{1/k})$ time. For the same stretch, and assuming the query time is $n^{o(1)}$ Abboud et al. proved an $\Omega(m^{1+\frac{1}{12.7552 \cdot k}})$ lower bound on the preprocessing time; we improve it to $\Omega(m^{1+\frac1{2k}})$ which is only a factor 2 away from the upper bound. We also obtain tight bounds for stretch $2+o(1)$ and $3-\epsilon$ and higher lower bounds for dynamic shortest paths. * Listing 4-cycles: Abboud et al. proved the first super-linear lower bound for listing all 4-cycles in a graph, ruling out $(m^{1.1927}+t)^{1+o(1)}$ time algorithms where $t$ is the number of 4-cycles. We settle the complexity of this basic problem by showing that the $\widetilde{O}(\min(m^{4/3},n^2) +t)$ upper bound is tight up to $n^{o(1)}$ factors. Our results exploit a rich tool set from additive combinatorics, most notably the Balog-Szemer\'edi-Gowers theorem and Rusza's covering lemma. A key ingredient that may be of independent interest is a subquadratic algorithm for 3-SUM if one of the sets has small doubling.