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When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.30
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-163713
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2022/16371/
Bringmann, Karl ;
Cassis, Alejandro ;
Fischer, Nick ;
Künnemann, Marvin
A Structural Investigation of the Approximability of Polynomial-Time Problems
Abstract
An extensive research effort targets optimal (in)approximability results for various NP-hard optimization problems. Notably, the works of (Creignou'95) as well as (Khanna, Sudan, Trevisan, Williamson'00) establish a tight characterization of a large subclass of MaxSNP, namely Boolean MaxCSPs and further variants, in terms of their polynomial-time approximability. Can we obtain similarly encompassing characterizations for classes of polynomial-time optimization problems?
To this end, we initiate the systematic study of a recently introduced polynomial-time analogue of MaxSNP, which includes a large number of well-studied problems (including Nearest and Furthest Neighbor in the Hamming metric, Maximum Inner Product, optimization variants of k-XOR and Maximum k-Cover). Specifically, for each k, MaxSP_k denotes the class of O(m^k)-time problems of the form max_{x_1,… , x_k} #{y : ϕ(x_1,… ,x_k,y)} where ϕ is a quantifier-free first-order property and m denotes the size of the relational structure. Assuming central hypotheses about clique detection in hypergraphs and exact Max-3-SAT}, we show that for any MaxSP_k problem definable by a quantifier-free m-edge graph formula φ, the best possible approximation guarantee in faster-than-exhaustive-search time O(m^{k-δ})falls into one of four categories:
- optimizable to exactness in time O(m^{k-δ}),
- an (inefficient) approximation scheme, i.e., a (1+ε)-approximation in time O(m^{k-f(ε)}),
- a (fixed) constant-factor approximation in time O(m^{k-δ}), or
- a nm^ε-approximation in time O(m^{k-f(ε)}).
We obtain an almost complete characterization of these regimes, for MaxSP_k as well as for an analogously defined minimization class MinSP_k. As our main technical contribution, we show how to rule out the existence of approximation schemes for a large class of problems admitting constant-factor approximations, under a hypothesis for exact Sparse Max-3-SAT algorithms posed by (Alman, Vassilevska Williams'20). As general trends for the problems we consider, we observe: (1) Exact optimizability has a simple algebraic characterization, (2) only few maximization problems do not admit a constant-factor approximation; these do not even have a subpolynomial-factor approximation, and (3) constant-factor approximation of minimization problems is equivalent to deciding whether the optimum is equal to 0.
BibTeX - Entry
@InProceedings{bringmann_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.30,
author = {Bringmann, Karl and Cassis, Alejandro and Fischer, Nick and K\"{u}nnemann, Marvin},
title = {{A Structural Investigation of the Approximability of Polynomial-Time Problems}},
booktitle = {49th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2022)},
pages = {30:1--30:20},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-235-8},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2022},
volume = {229},
editor = {Boja\'{n}czyk, Miko{\l}aj and Merelli, Emanuela and Woodruff, David P.},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2022/16371},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-163713},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.30},
annote = {Keywords: Classification Theorems, Hardness of Approximation in P, Fine-grained Complexity Theory}
}
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Keywords: |
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Classification Theorems, Hardness of Approximation in P, Fine-grained Complexity Theory |
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Collection: |
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49th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2022) |
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Issue Date: |
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2022 |
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Date of publication: |
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28.06.2022 |
