Related papers: Proving Unsatisfiability with Hitting Formulas
Hitting formulas, introduced by Iwama, are an unusual class of propositional CNF formulas. Not only is their satisfiability decidable in polynomial time, but even their models can be counted in closed form. This stands in stark contrast…
We show that Cutting Planes (CP) proofs are hard to find: Given an unsatisfiable formula $F$, 1) It is NP-hard to find a CP refutation of $F$ in time polynomial in the length of the shortest such refutation; and 2)unless Gap-Hitting-Set…
A matched formula is a CNF formula whose incidence graph admits a matching which matches a distinct variable to every clause. We study phase transition in a context of matched formulas and their generalization of biclique satisfiable…
The topic of this paper is the Finiteness Conjecture for minimally unsatisfiable clause-sets (MUs), stating that for each fixed deficiency (number of clauses minus number of variables) there are only finitely many patterns, given a certain…
We show that the Satisfiability (SAT) problem for CNF formulas with {\beta}-acyclic hypergraphs can be solved in polynomial time by using a special type of Davis-Putnam resolution in which each resolvent is a subset of a parent clause. We…
We study -- within the framework of propositional proof complexity -- the problem of certifying unsatisfiability of CNF formulas under the promise that any satisfiable formula has many satisfying assignments, where ``many'' stands for an…
We formalize a framework of algebraically natural lower bounds for algebraic circuits. Just as with the natural proofs notion of Razborov and Rudich for boolean circuit lower bounds, our notion of algebraically natural lower bounds captures…
We present a general method for converting any family of unsatisfiable CNF formulas that is hard for one of the simplest proof systems, tree resolution, into formulas that require large rank in any proof system that manipulates polynomials…
$ \newcommand{\inparen}[1]{\left( #1 \right)} \newcommand{\pfrac}[2]{\inparen{\frac{1}{2}}} \newcommand{\ilog}[1]{\log^{\circ #1}} \newcommand{\F}{\mathbb{F}} $The Polynomial Identity Lemma (also called the "Schwartz--Zippel lemma") states…
The Schwartz-Zippel Lemma states that if a low-degree multivariate polynomial with coefficients in a field is not zero everywhere in the field, then it has few roots on every finite subcube of the field. This fundamental fact about…
In this note we show that unsatisfiable systems of linear equations with a constant number of variables per equation over prime finite fields have polynomial-size constant-degree semi-algebraic proofs of unsatisfiability. These are proofs…
We call a CNF formula linear if any two clauses have at most one variable in common. We show that there exist unsatisfiable linear k-CNF formulas with at most 4k^2 4^k clauses, and on the other hand, any linear k-CNF formula with at most…
We call a depth-4 formula C set-depth-4 if there exists a (unknown) partition (X_1,...,X_d) of the variable indices [n] that the top product layer respects, i.e. C(x) = \sum_{i=1}^k \prod_{j=1}^{d} f_{i,j}(x_{X_j}), where f_{i,j} is a…
Motivated by the fundamental lower bounds questions in proof complexity, we initiate the study of matrix identities as hard instances for strong proof systems. A matrix identity of $d \times d$ matrices over a field $\mathbb{F}$, is a…
The Stabbing Planes proof system was introduced to model the reasoning carried out in practical mixed integer programming solvers. As a proof system, it is powerful enough to simulate Cutting Planes and to refute the Tseitin formulas --…
Hitting Set is a classic problem in combinatorial optimization. Its input consists of a set system F over a finite universe U and an integer t; the question is whether there is a set of t elements that intersects every set in F. The Hitting…
The evaluation of incomplete satisfiability solvers depends critically on the availability of hard satisfiable instances. A plausible source of such instances consists of random k-SAT formulas whose clauses are chosen uniformly from among…
We study the complexity of the Hitting Set problem in set systems (hypergraphs) that avoid certain sub-structures. In particular, we characterize the classical and parameterized complexity of the problem when the Vapnik-Chervonenkis…
We build on a recently proposed method for explaining solutions of constraint satisfaction problems. An explanation here is a sequence of simple inference steps, where the simplicity of an inference step is measured by the number and types…
In this paper we provide a new method to certify that a nearby polynomial system has a singular isolated root with a prescribed multiplicity structure. More precisely, given a polynomial system f $=(f\_1, \ldots, f\_N)\in C[x\_1, \ldots,…