English

The Complexity of Holant Problems over Boolean Domain with Non-negative Weights

Computational Complexity 2017-02-21 v2

Abstract

Holant problem is a general framework to study the computational complexity of counting problems. We prove a complexity dichotomy theorem for Holant problems over Boolean domain with non-negative weights. It is the first complete Holant dichotomy where constraint functions are not necessarily symmetric. Holant problems are indeed read-twice #\#CSPs. Intuitively, some #\#CSPs that are #\#P-hard become tractable when restricting to read-twice instances. To capture them, we introduce the Block-rank-one condition. It turns out that the condition leads to a clear separation. If a function set F\mathcal{F} satisfies the condition, then F\mathcal{F} is of affine type or product type. Otherwise (a) Holant(F)\mathrm{Holant}(\mathcal{F}) is #\#P-hard; or (b) every function in F\mathcal{F} is a tensor product of functions of arity at most 2; or (c) F\mathcal{F} is transformable to a product type by some real orthogonal matrix. Holographic transformations play an important role in both the hardness proof and the characterization of tractability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.00975,
  title  = {The Complexity of Holant Problems over Boolean Domain with Non-negative Weights},
  author = {Jiabao Lin and Hanpin Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.00975},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:40:49.023Z