Related papers: Lower Bounding the AND-OR Tree via Symmetrization
For an undirected tree with $n$ edges labelled by single letters, we consider its substrings, which are labels of the simple paths between pairs of nodes. We prove that there are $O(n^{1.5})$ different palindromic substrings. This solves an…
Recently, Balliu, Brandt, and Olivetti [FOCS '20] showed the first $\omega(\log^* n)$ lower bound for the maximal independent set (MIS) problem in trees. In this work we prove lower bounds for a much more relaxed family of distributed…
We consider the top tree compression scheme introduced by Bille et al. [ICALP 2013] and construct an infinite family of trees on $n$ nodes labeled from an alphabet of size $\sigma$, for which the size of the top DAG is…
Alon, Seymour and Thomas [1990] proved that every $n$-vertex graph excluding $K_t$ as a minor has treewidth less than $t^{3/2}\sqrt{n}$. Illingworth, Scott and Wood [2022] recently refined this result by showing that every such graph is a…
We prove superpolynomial length lower bounds for the semantic tree-like Frege refutation system with bounded line size. Concretely, for any function $n^{2-\varepsilon} \leq s(n) \leq 2^{n^{1-\varepsilon}}$ we exhibit an explicit family…
We exhibit families of $4$-CNF formulas over $n$ variables that have sums-of-squares (SOS) proofs of unsatisfiability of degree (a.k.a. rank) $d$ but require SOS proofs of size $n^{\Omega(d)}$ for values of $d = d(n)$ from constant all the…
We give a general method for proving quantum lower bounds for problems with small range. Namely, we show that, for any symmetric problem defined on functions $f:\{1, ..., N\}\to\{1, ..., M\}$, its polynomial degree is the same for all…
In this short paper, we present an improved algorithm for approximating the minimum cut on distributed (CONGEST) networks. Let $\lambda$ be the minimum cut. Our algorithm can compute $\lambda$ exactly in…
We prove several new tight distributed lower bounds for classic symmetry breaking graph problems. As a basic tool, we first provide a new insightful proof that any deterministic distributed algorithm that computes a $\Delta$-coloring on…
We investigate the complexity of uniform OR circuits and AND circuits of polynomial-size and depth. As their name suggests, OR circuits have OR gates as their computation gates, as well as the usual input, output and constant (0/1) gates.…
The threshold degree of a Boolean function f:{0,1}^n->{-1,+1} is the least degree of a real polynomial p such that f(x)=sgn p(x). We construct two halfspaces on {0,1}^n whose intersection has threshold degree Theta(sqrt n), an exponential…
Given a graph $G = (V, E)$, we wish to compute a spanning tree whose maximum vertex degree, i.e. tree degree, is as small as possible. Computing the exact optimal solution is known to be NP-hard, since it generalizes the Hamiltonian path…
We concentrate on some recent results of Egawa and Ozeki [J. Graph Theory, 2015 and Combinatorica, 2014], and He et al. [J. Graph Theory, 2002]. We give shorter proofs and polynomial time algorithms as well. We present two new proofs for…
The Constant Degree Hypothesis was introduced by Barrington et. al. (1990) to study some extensions of $q$-groups by nilpotent groups and the power of these groups in a certain computational model. In its simplest formulation, it…
The classical branch-and-bound algorithm for the integer feasibility problem has exponential worst case complexity. We prove that it is surprisingly efficient on reformulated problems, in which the columns of the constraint matrix are…
In this paper we study a polynomial time algorithms that for an input $A\subseteq {B_m}$ outputs a decision tree for $A$ of minimum depth. This problem has many applications that include, to name a few, computer vision, group testing, exact…
We prove a lower bound of $\Omega(n^2/\log^2 n)$ on the size of any syntactically multilinear arithmetic circuit computing some explicit multilinear polynomial $f(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$. Our approach expands and improves upon a result of Raz,…
We investigate the computation of minimum-cost spanning trees satisfying prescribed vertex degree constraints: Given a graph $G$ and a constraint function $D$, we ask for a (minimum-cost) spanning tree $T$ such that for each vertex $v$, $T$…
We present a general method for obtaining strong bounds for discrete optimization problems that is based on a concept of branching duality. It can be applied when no useful integer programming model is available, and we illustrate this with…
We study the fundamental challenge of exhibiting explicit functions that have small correlation with low-degree polynomials over $\mathbb{F}_{2}$. Our main contributions include: 1. In STOC 2020, CHHLZ introduced a new technique to prove…