Related papers: Quantum and Randomized Lower Bounds for Local Sear…

Local Search problem, which finds a local minimum of a black-box function on a given graph, is of both practical and theoretical importance to combinatorial optimization, complexity theory and many other areas in theoretical computer…

The Local Search problem, which finds a local minimum of a black-box function on a given graph, is of both practical and theoretical importance to many areas in computer science and natural sciences. In this paper, we show that for the…

Local search is a powerful heuristic in optimization and computer science, the complexity of which has been studied in the white box and black box models. In the black box model, we are given a graph $G = (V,E)$ and oracle access to a…

The problem of finding a local minimum of a black-box function is central for understanding local search as well as quantum adiabatic algorithms. For functions on the Boolean hypercube {0,1}^n, we show a lower bound of Omega(2^{n/4}/n) on…

We consider the quantum query complexity of local search as a function of graph geometry. Given a graph $G = (V,E)$ with $n$ vertices and black box access to a function $f : V \to \mathbb{R}$, the goal is find a vertex $v$ that is a local…

Local search is a powerful heuristic in optimization and computer science, the complexity of which was studied in the white box and black box models. In the black box model, we are given a graph $G = (V,E)$ and oracle access to a function…

We analyze the query complexity of finding a local minimum in $t$ rounds on general graphs. More precisely, given a graph $G = (V,E)$ and oracle access to an unknown function $f : V \to \mathbb{R}$, the goal is to find a local minimum--a…

Let G=(V,E) be a finite graph, and f:V->N be any function. The Local Search problem consists in finding a local minimum of the function f on G, that is a vertex v such that f(v) is not larger than the value of f on the neighbors of v in G.…

We consider the query complexity of finding a local minimum of a function defined on a graph. This abstract problem is fundamental to many optimization tasks, such as finding a local minimum of the loss function when training deep neural…

In this work, we resolve the query complexity of global minimum cut problem for a graph by designing a randomized algorithm for approximating the size of minimum cut in a graph, where the graph can be accessed through local queries like…

We prove an $\Omega(d \lg n/ (\lg\lg n)^2)$ lower bound on the dynamic cell-probe complexity of statistically $\mathit{oblivious}$ approximate-near-neighbor search ($\mathsf{ANN}$) over the $d$-dimensional Hamming cube. For the natural…

The minimum cut problem in an undirected and weighted graph $G$ is to find the minimum total weight of a set of edges whose removal disconnects $G$. We completely characterize the quantum query and time complexity of the minimum cut problem…

Let $H$ be a fixed graph on $n$ vertices. Let $f_H(G) = 1$ iff the input graph $G$ on $n$ vertices contains $H$ as a (not necessarily induced) subgraph. Let $\alpha_H$ denote the cardinality of a maximum independent set of $H$. In this…

We study the first-order convex optimization problem, where we have black-box access to a (not necessarily smooth) function $f:\mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ and its (sub)gradient. Our goal is to find an $\epsilon$-approximate minimum of $f$…

The Minimum Vertex Cover (MinVC) problem is a well-known NP-hard problem. Recently there has been great interest in solving this problem on real-world massive graphs. For such graphs, local search is a promising approach to finding optimal…

Let $H$ be a fixed $k$-vertex graph with $m$ edges and minimum degree $d >0$. We use the learning graph framework of Belovs to show that the bounded-error quantum query complexity of determining if an $n$-vertex graph contains $H$ as a…

In 1983, Aldous proved that randomization can speedup local search. For example, it reduces the query complexity of local search over [1:n]^d from Theta (n^{d-1}) to O (d^{1/2}n^{d/2}). It remains open whether randomization helps…

Very recently, Khoury and Schild [FOCS 2025] showed that any randomized LOCAL algorithm that solves maximal matching requires $\Omega(\min\{\log \Delta, \log_\Delta n\})$ rounds, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the graph and $\Delta$ is…

In the study of deterministic distributed algorithms it is commonly assumed that each node has a unique $O(\log n)$-bit identifier. We prove that for a general class of graph problems, local algorithms (constant-time distributed algorithms)…

We establish a lower bound concerning the computational complexity of Grover's algorithms on fractal networks. This bound provides general predictions for the quantum advantage gained for searching unstructured lists. It yields a…