Related papers: A Characterization of Approximation Resistance
The polynomial hierarchy is a grading of problems by difficulty, including P, NP and coNP as the best known classes. The promise polynomial hierarchy is similar, but extended to include promise problems. It turns out that the promise…
We study the efficient approximability of basic graph and logic problems in the literature when instances are specified hierarchically as in \cite{Le89} or are specified by 1-dimensional finite narrow periodic specifications as in…
We study the Sherali-Adams linear programming hierarchy in the context of promise constraint satisfaction problems (PCSPs). We characterise when a level of the hierarchy accepts an instance in terms of a homomorphism problem for an…
Many problems are NP-hard and, unless P = NP, do not admit polynomial-time exact algorithms. The fastest known exact algorithms exactly usually take time exponential in the input size. Much research effort has gone into obtaining faster…
Many problems of theoretical and practical interest involve finding an optimum over a family of convex functions. For instance, finding the projection on the convex functions in $H^k(\Omega)$, and optimizing functionals arising from some…
Approximations of functions with finite data often do not respect certain "structural" properties of the functions. For example, if a given function is non-negative, a polynomial approximation of the function is not necessarily also…
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…
We give a trichotomy theorem for the complexity of approximately counting the number of satisfying assignments of a Boolean CSP instance. Such problems are parameterised by a constraint language specifying the relations that may be used in…
The minimum unsatisfiability version of a constraint satisfaction problem (MinCSP) asks for an assignment where the number of unsatisfied constraints is minimum possible, or equivalently, asks for a minimum-size set of constraints whose…
We give a new algorithm for Unique Games which is based on purely {\em spectral} techniques, in contrast to previous work in the area, which relies heavily on semidefinite programming (SDP). Given a highly satisfiable instance of Unique…
We consider finite element approximations of ill-posed elliptic problems with conditional stability. The notion of {\emph{optimal error estimates}} is defined including both convergence with respect to mesh parameter and perturbations in…
We consider the problem of robust polynomial regression, where one receives samples $(x_i, y_i)$ that are usually within $\sigma$ of a polynomial $y = p(x)$, but have a $\rho$ chance of being arbitrary adversarial outliers. Previously, it…
The vertex cover problem is a famous combinatorial problem, and its complexity has been heavily studied. While a 2-approximation can be trivially obtained for it, researchers have not been able to approximate it better than 2-\textit{o}(1).…
A generalized polymorphism of a predicate $P \subseteq \{0,1\}^m$ is a tuple of functions $f_1,\dots,f_m\colon \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ satisfying the following property: If $x^{(1)},\dots,x^{(m)} \in \{0,1\}^n$ are such that…
Chance constrained program where one seeks to minimize an objective over decisions which satisfy randomly disturbed constraints with a given probability is computationally intractable. This paper proposes an approximate approach to address…
We prove super-polynomial lower bounds on the size of linear programming relaxations for approximation versions of constraint satisfaction problems. We show that for these problems, polynomial-sized linear programs are exactly as powerful…
An instance of Max CSP is a finite collection of constraints on a set of variables, and the goal is to assign values to the variables that maximises the number of satisfied constraints. Max CSP captures many well-known problems (such as Max…
A unary constraint (on the Boolean domain) is a function from {0,1} to the set of real numbers. A free use of auxiliary unary constraints given besides input instances has proven to be useful in establishing a complete classification of the…
Proximal distance algorithms combine the classical penalty method of constrained minimization with distance majorization. If $f(\boldsymbol{x})$ is the loss function, and $C$ is the constraint set in a constrained minimization problem, then…
In this extended abstract, we discuss the opportunity to formally verify that inference systems for probabilistic programming guarantee good performance. In particular, we focus on hybrid inference systems that combine exact and approximate…