Related papers: Strengthened Hardness for Approximating Minimum Un…
We generalize H\r{a}stad's long-code test for projection games and show that it remains complete and sound against entangled provers. Combined with a result of Dong et al. \cite{Dong25}, which establishes that $\MIP^*=\RE$ with…
In recent work of Hazan and Krauthgamer (SICOMP 2011), it was shown that finding an $\eps$-approximate Nash equilibrium with near-optimal value in a two-player game is as hard as finding a hidden clique of size $O(\log n)$ in the random…
In this paper, we study the average case complexity of the Unique Games problem. We propose a natural semi-random model, in which a unique game instance is generated in several steps. First an adversary selects a completely satisfiable…
A simple game $(N,v)$ is given by a set $N$ of $n$ players and a partition of $2^N$ into a set $\mathcal{L}$ of losing coalitions $L$ with value $v(L)=0$ that is closed under taking subsets and a set $\mathcal{W}$ of winning coalitions $W$…
We present an approximation scheme for optimizing certain Quadratic Integer Programming problems with positive semidefinite objective functions and global linear constraints. This framework includes well known graph problems such as Minimum…
This article explores the minimum approximation ratio for Nash equilibrium in bi-matrix games, focusing on the Tsaknakis and Spirakis (TS) methods. The previous SOTA, TS algorithm, achieved an approximation ratio of 0.3393, but efforts to…
Pebble games are single-player games on DAGs involving placing and moving pebbles on nodes of the graph according to a certain set of rules. The goal is to pebble a set of target nodes using a minimum number of pebbles. In this paper, we…
Recent successes of game-theoretic formulations in ML have caused a resurgence of research interest in differentiable games. Overwhelmingly, that research focuses on methods and upper bounds on their speed of convergence. In this work, we…
We consider a randomized algorithm for the unique games problem, using independent multinomial probabilities to assign labels to the vertices of a graph. The expected value of the solution obtained by the algorithm is expressed as a…
In this short note, the author shows that the gap problem of some $k$-CSPs with the support of its predicate the ground of a balanced pairwise independent distribution can be solved by a modified version of Hast's Algorithm BiLin that calls…
We consider one-round games between a classical verifier and two provers who share entanglement. We show that when the constraints enforced by the verifier are `unique' constraints (i.e., permutations), the value of the game can be well…
This paper is about computing constrained approximate Nash equilibria in polymatrix games, which are succinctly represented many-player games defined by an interaction graph between the players. In a recent breakthrough, Rubinstein showed…
The weighted $3$-Set Packing problem is defined as follows: As input, we are given a collection $\mathcal{S}$ of sets, each of cardinality at most $3$ and equipped with a positive weight. The task is to find a disjoint sub-collection of…
The long code is a central tool in hardness of approximation, especially in questions related to the unique games conjecture. We construct a new code that is exponentially more efficient, but can still be used in many of these applications.…
Much progress has been made in misere game theory using the technique of restricted misere play, where games can be considered equivalent inside a restricted set of games without being equal in general. This paper provides a survey of…
We analyze the oracle complexity of the stochastic Halpern iteration with minibatch, where we aim to approximate fixed-points of nonexpansive and contractive operators in a normed finite-dimensional space. We show that if the underlying…
Ryser's Conjecture states that any $r$-partite $r$-uniform hypergraph has a vertex cover of size at most $r - 1$ times the size of the largest matching. For $r = 2$, the conjecture is simply K\"onig's Theorem and every bipartite graph is a…
The Small Set Expansion Hypothesis (SSEH) is a conjecture which roughly states that it is NP-hard to distinguish between a graph with a small subset of vertices whose edge expansion is almost zero and one in which all small subsets of…
We investigate the computational complexity of min-max optimization under coupled constraints. The work of Daskalakis, Skoulakis, and Zampetakis [DSZ21] was the first to study min-max optimization through the lens of computational…
We propose a new conjecture on hardness of low-degree $2$-CSP's, and show that new hardness of approximation results for Densest $k$-Subgraph and several other problems, including a graph partitioning problem, and a variation of the Graph…