A dichotomy theorem for nonuniform CSPs simplified
Andrei A. Bulatov
备注：
This is an updated and improved version of the proof of the CSP dichotomy from CoRR abs/1703.03021, 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1703.03021
In a non-uniform Constraint Satisfaction problem CSP(G), where G is a set of relations on a finite set A, the goal is to find an assignment of values to variables subject to constraints imposed on specified sets of variables using the relations from G. The Dichotomy Conjecture for the non-uniform CSP states that for every constraint language G the problem CSP(G) is either solvable in polynomial time or is NP-complete. It was proposed by Feder and Vardi in their seminal 1993 paper. In this paper we confirm the Dichotomy Conjecture.
We prove a complexity dichotomy theorem for all non-negative weighted counting Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). This caps a long series of important results on counting problems including unweighted and weighted graph homomorphisms and the celebrated dichotomy theorem for unweighted #CSP. Our dichotomy theorem gives a succinct criterion for tractability. If a set F of constraint functions satisfies the criterion, then the counting CSP problem defined by F is solvable in polynomial time; if it does not satisfy the criterion, then the problem is #P-hard. We furthermore show that the quest…
We determine the computational complexity of approximately counting the total weight of variable assignments for every complex-weighted Boolean constraint satisfaction problem (or CSP) with any number of additional unary (i.e., arity 1) constraints, particularly, when degrees of input instances are bounded from above by a fixed constant. All degree-1 counting CSPs are obviously solvable in polynomial time. When the instance's degree is more than two, we present a dichotomy theorem that classifies all counting CSPs admitting free unary constraints into exactly two categories. This classificatio…
We develop the novel machinery of smooth approximations, and apply it to confirm the CSP dichotomy conjecture for first-order reducts of the random tournament, various homogeneous graphs including the random graph, and for expansions of the order of the rationals. Apart from obtaining these dichotomy results, we show how our new proof technique allows to unify and significantly simplify the previous results from the literature. For all but the last structure, we moreover characterize those CSPs which are solvable by local consistency methods, again using the same machinery.
We study the complexity of valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSP). A problem from VCSP is characterised by a \emph{constraint language}, a fixed set of cost functions over a finite domain. An instance of the problem is specified by a sum of cost functions from the language and the goal is to minimise the sum. We consider the case of so-called \emph{conservative} languages; that is, languages containing all unary cost functions, thus allowing arbitrary restrictions on the domains of the variables. We prove a Schaefer-like dichotomy theorem for this case: if all cost functions in the lan…
A classic result due to Schaefer (1978) classifies all constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) over the Boolean domain as being either in $\mathsf{P}$ or $\mathsf{NP}$-hard. This paper considers a promise-problem variant of CSPs called PCSPs. A PCSP over a finite set of pairs of constraints $Γ$ consists of a pair $(Ψ_P, Ψ_Q)$ of CSPs with the same set of variables such that for every $(P, Q) \in Γ$, $P(x_{i_1}, ..., x_{i_k})$ is a clause of $Ψ_P$ if and only if $Q(x_{i_1}, ..., x_{i_k})$ is a clause of $Ψ_Q$. The promise problem $\operatorname{PCSP}(Γ)$ is to distinguish, given $(Ψ_P, Ψ_Q)$, b…
The logic MMSNP is a restricted fragment of existential second-order logic which allows to express many interesting queries in graph theory and finite model theory. The logic was introduced by Feder and Vardi who showed that every MMSNP sentence is computationally equivalent to a finite-domain constraint satisfaction problem (CSP); the involved probabilistic reductions were derandomized by Kun using explicit constructions of expander structures. We present a new proof of the reduction to finite-domain CSPs which does not rely on the results of Kun. This new proof allows us to obtain a stronger…
Amalgamation SNP (ASNP) is a fragment of existential second-order logic that strictly contains binary connected MMSNP of Feder and Vardi and binary guarded monotone SNP of Bienvenu, ten Cate, Lutz, and Wolter; it is a promising candidate for an expressive subclass of NP that exhibits a complexity dichotomy. We show that ASNP has a complexity dichotomy if and only if the infinite-domain dichotomy conjecture holds for constraint satisfaction problems for first-order reducts of binary finitely bounded homogeneous structures. For such CSPs, powerful universal-algebraic hardness conditions are know…
We give a precise algebraic characterisation of the power of Sherali-Adams relaxations for solvability of valued constraint satisfaction problems to optimality. The condition is that of bounded width which has already been shown to capture the power of local consistency methods for decision CSPs and the power of semidefinite programming for robust approximation of CSPs. Our characterisation has several algorithmic and complexity consequences. On the algorithmic side, we show that several novel and many known valued constraint languages are tractable via the third level of the Sherali-Adams rel…
Valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) are discrete optimisation problems with a $(\mathbb{Q}\cup\{\infty\})$-valued objective function given as a sum of fixed-arity functions. In Boolean surjective VCSPs, variables take on labels from $D=\{0,1\}$ and an optimal assignment is required to use both labels from $D$. Examples include the classical global Min-Cut problem in graphs and the Minimum Distance problem studied in coding theory. We establish a dichotomy theorem and thus give a complete complexity classification of Boolean surjective VCSPs with respect to exact solvability. Our wo…
An instance of the Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problem (VCSP) is given by a finite set of variables, a finite domain of labels, and a sum of functions, each function depending on a subset of the variables. Each function can take finite values specifying costs of assignments of labels to its variables or the infinite value, which indicates infeasible assignments. The goal is to find an assignment of labels to the variables that minimizes the sum. We study (assuming that P $\ne$ NP) how the complexity of this very general problem depends on the set of functions allowed in the instances, the s…
Conservative constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) constitute an important particular case of the general CSP, in which the allowed values of each variable can be restricted in an arbitrary way. Problems of this type are well studied for graph homomorphisms. A dichotomy theorem characterizing conservative CSPs solvable in polynomial time and proving that the remaining ones are NP-complete was proved by Bulatov in 2003. Its proof, however, is quite long and technical. A shorter proof of this result based on the absorbing subuniverses technique was suggested by Barto in 2011. In this paper we …
The algebraic dichotomy conjecture for Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) of reducts of (infinite) finitely bounded homogeneous structures states that such CSPs are polynomial-time tractable when the model-complete core of the template has a pseudo-Siggers polymorphism, and NP-complete otherwise. One of the important questions related to this conjecture is whether, similarly to the case of finite structures, the condition of having a pseudo-Siggers polymorphism can be replaced by the condition of having polymorphisms satisfying a fixed set of identities of height 1, i.e., identities which…
Constraint satisfaction problems (or CSPs) have been extensively studied in, for instance, artificial intelligence, database theory, graph theory, and statistical physics. From a practical viewpoint, it is beneficial to approximately solve those CSPs. When one tries to approximate the total number of truth assignments that satisfy all Boolean-valued constraints for (unweighted) Boolean CSPs, there is a known trichotomy theorem by which all such counting problems are neatly classified into exactly three categories under polynomial-time (randomized) approximation-preserving reductions. In contra…
A Complexity Dichotomy for Temporal Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problems
Institute of Algebra, TU Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学代数研究所）；Univ Lyon, CNRS, ENS de Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, LIP UMR5668（里昂大学、法国国家科学研究中心、巴黎高等师范学院里昂分校、里昂第一大学LIP实验室）；Institute of Discrete Mathematics and Geometry, TU Wien（维也纳工业大学离散数学与几何研究所）
A counting constraint satisfaction problem (#CSP) asks for the number of ways to satisfy a given list of constraints, drawn from a fixed constraint language Γ. We study how hard it is to evaluate this number approximately. There is an interesting partial classification, due to Dyer, Goldberg, Jalsenius and Richerby, of Boolean constraint languages when the degree of instances is bounded by d>=3 - every variable appears in at most d constraints - under the assumption that "pinning" is allowed as part of the instance. We study the d=2 case under the stronger assumption that "variable weights" ar…
Maximum surjective constraint satisfaction problems (Max-Sur-CSPs) are computational problems where we are given a set of variables denoting values from a finite domain B and a set of constraints on the variables. A solution to such a problem is a surjective mapping from the set of variables to B such that the number of satisfied constraints is maximized. We study the approximation performance that can be acccchieved by algorithms for these problems, mainly by investigating their relation with Max-CSPs (which are the corresponding problems without the surjectivity requirement). Our work gives …
In the field of constraint satisfaction problems (CSP), promise CSPs are an exciting new direction of study. In a promise CSP, each constraint comes in two forms: "strict" and "weak," and in the associated decision problem one must distinguish between being able to satisfy all the strict constraints versus not being able to satisfy all the weak constraints. The most commonly cited example of a promise CSP is the approximate graph coloring problem--which has recently seen exciting progress [BKO19, WZ20] benefiting from a systematic algebraic approach to promise CSPs based on "polymorphisms," op…
We study the computational complexity of exact minimisation of rational-valued discrete functions. Let $Γ$ be a set of rational-valued functions on a fixed finite domain; such a set is called a finite-valued constraint language. The valued constraint satisfaction problem, $\operatorname{VCSP}(Γ)$, is the problem of minimising a function given as a sum of functions from $Γ$. We establish a dichotomy theorem with respect to exact solvability for all finite-valued constraint languages defined on domains of arbitrary finite size. We show that every constraint language $Γ$ either admits a binary sy…
In this work we consider the approximability of $\textsf{Max-CSP}(f)$ in the context of sketching algorithms and completely characterize the approximability of all Boolean CSPs. Specifically, given $f$, $γ$ and $β$ we show that either (1) the $(γ,β)$-approximation version of $\textsf{Max-CSP}(f)$ has a linear sketching algorithm using $O(\log n)$ space, or (2) for every $ε> 0$ the $(γ-ε,β+ε)$-approximation version of $\textsf{Max-CSP}(f)$ requires $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ space for any sketching algorithm. We also prove lower bounds against streaming algorithms for several CSPs. In particular, we recover…
Finite-domain constraint satisfaction problems are either solvable by Datalog, or not even expressible in fixed-point logic with counting. The border between the two regimes coincides with an important dichotomy in universal algebra; in particular, the border can be described by a strong height-one Maltsev condition. For infinite-domain CSPs, the situation is more complicated even if the template structure of the CSP is model-theoretically tame. We prove that there is no Maltsev condition that characterizes Datalog already for the CSPs of first-order reducts of (Q;<); such CSPs are called temp…
We prove that an $ω$-categorical core structure primitively positively interprets all finite structures with parameters if and only if some stabilizer of its polymorphism clone has a homomorphism to the clone of projections, and that this happens if and only if its polymorphism clone does not contain operations $α$, $β$, $s$ satisfying the identity $αs(x,y,x,z,y,z) \approx βs(y,x,z,x,z,y)$. This establishes an algebraic criterion equivalent to the conjectured borderline between P and NP-complete CSPs over reducts of finitely bounded homogenous structures, and accomplishes one of the steps of a…
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 $\…
We study the complexity of valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSP). A problem from VCSP is characterised by a \emph{constraint language}, a fixed set of cost functions over a finite domain. An instance of the problem is specified by a sum of cost functions from the language and the goal is to minimise the sum. We consider the case of so-called \emph{conservative} languages; that is, languages containing all unary cost functions, thus allowing arbitrary restrictions on the domains of the variables. This problem has been studied by Bulatov [LICS'03] for $\{0,\infty\}$-valued languages (i.…
A computational problem exhibits a "gap property" when there is no tractable boundary between two disjoint sets of instances. We establish a Gap Trichotomy Theorem for a family of constraint problem variants, completely classifying the complexity of possible ${\bf NP}$-hard gaps in the case of Boolean domains. As a consequence, we obtain a number of dichotomies for the complexity of specific variants of the constraint satisfaction problem: all are either polynomial-time tractable or $\mathbf{NP}$-complete. Schaefer's original dichotomy for $\textsf{SAT}$ variants is a notable particular case. …
We investigate the computational complexity of the problem of counting the maximal satisfying assignments of a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) over the Boolean domain {0,1}. A satisfying assignment is maximal if any new assignment which is obtained from it by changing a 0 to a 1 is unsatisfying. For each constraint language Gamma, #MaximalCSP(Gamma) denotes the problem of counting the maximal satisfying assignments, given an input CSP with constraints in Gamma. We give a complexity dichotomy for the problem of exactly counting the maximal satisfying assignments and a complexity trichotom…
A PCSP is a combination of two CSPs defined by two similar templates; the computational question is to distinguish a YES instance of the first one from a NO instance of the second. The computational complexity of many PCSPs remains unknown. Even the case of Boolean templates (solved for CSP by Schaefer [STOC'78]) remains wide open. The main result of Brakensiek and Guruswami [SODA'18] shows that Boolean PCSPs exhibit a dichotomy (PTIME vs. NPC) when "all the clauses are symmetric and allow for negation of variables''. In this paper we remove the "allow for negation of variables'' assumption fr…
In the constraint satisfaction problem ($CSP$), the aim is to find an assignment of values to a set of variables subject to specified constraints. In the minimum cost homomorphism problem ($MinHom$), one is additionally given weights $c_{va}$ for every variable $v$ and value $a$, and the aim is to find an assignment $f$ to the variables that minimizes $\sum_{v} c_{vf(v)}$. Let $MinHom(Γ)$ denote the $MinHom$ problem parameterized by the set of predicates allowed for constraints. $MinHom(Γ)$ is related to many well-studied combinatorial optimization problems, and concrete applications can be fo…
An elegant characterization of the complexity of constraint satisfaction problems has emerged in the form of the the algebraic dichotomy conjecture of [BKJ00]. Roughly speaking, the characterization asserts that a CSP Λ is tractable if and only if there exist certain non-trivial operations known as polymorphisms to combine solutions to Λ to create new ones. In an entirely separate line of work, the unique games conjecture yields a characterization of approximability of Max-CSPs. Surprisingly, this characterization for Max-CSPs can also be reformulated in the language of polymorphisms. In this …
For Boolean satisfiability problems, the structure of the solution space is characterized by the solution graph, where the vertices are the solutions, and two solutions are connected iff they differ in exactly one variable. For this implicitly defined graph, we here study the st-connectivity and connectivity problems. Building on the work of Gopalan et al. ("The Connectivity of Boolean Satisfiability: Computational and Structural Dichotomies", 2006/2009), we first investigate satisfiability problems given by CSPs, more exactly CNF(S)-formulas with constants (as considered in Schaefer's famous …
The exponential-time hypothesis (ETH) states that 3-SAT is not solvable in subexponential time, i.e. not solvable in O(c^n) time for arbitrary c > 1, where n denotes the number of variables. Problems like k-SAT can be viewed as special cases of the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), which is the problem of determining whether a set of constraints is satisfiable. In this paper we study thef worst-case time complexity of NP-complete CSPs. Our main interest is in the CSP problem parameterized by a constraint language Gamma (CSP(Gamma)), and how the choice of Gamma affects the time complexity.…
The Dichotomy Conjecture for constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) states that every CSP is in P or is NP-complete (Feder-Vardi, 1993). It has been verified for conservative problems (also known as list homomorphism problems) by A. Bulatov (2003). We augment this result by showing that for digraph templates H, every conservative CSP, denoted LHOM(H), is solvable in logspace or is hard for NL. More precisely, we introduce a digraph structure we call a circular N, and prove the following dichotomy: if H contains no circular N then LHOM(H) admits a logspace algorithm, and otherwise LHOM(H) is h…
The paper presents an algebraic framework for optimization problems expressible as Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problems. Our results generalize the algebraic framework for the decision version (CSPs) provided by Bulatov et al. [SICOMP 2005]. We introduce the notions of weighted algebras and varieties and use the Galois connection due to Cohen et al. [SICOMP 2013] to link VCSP languages to weighted algebras. We show that the difficulty of VCSP depends only on the weighted variety generated by the associated weighted algebra. Paralleling the results for CSPs we exhibit a reduction to cores an…
We produce a class of $ω$-categorical structures with finite signature by applying a model-theoretic construction -- a refinement of the Hrushosvki-encoding -- to $ω$-categorical structures in a possibly infinite signature. We show that the encoded structures retain desirable algebraic properties of the original structures, but that the constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) associated with these structures can be badly behaved in terms of computational complexity. This method allows us to systematically generate $ω$-categorical templates whose CSPs are complete for a variety of complexity cl…
It is well known that the constraint satisfaction problem over a general relational structure A is polynomial time equivalent to the constraint problem over some associated digraph. We present a variant of this construction and show that the corresponding constraint satisfaction problem is logspace equivalent to that over A. Moreover, we show that almost all of the commonly encountered polymorphism properties are held equivalently on the A and the constructed digraph. As a consequence, the Algebraic CSP dichotomy conjecture as well as the conjectures characterizing CSPs solvable in logspace an…
Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) constitute a convenient way to capture many combinatorial problems. The general CSP is known to be NP-complete, but its complexity depends on a template, usually a set of relations, upon which they are constructed. Following this template, there exist tractable and intractable instances of CSPs. It has been proved that for each CSP problem over a given set of relations there exists a corresponding CSP problem over graphs of unary functions belonging to the same complexity class. In this short note we show a dichotomy theorem for every finite domain D of C…
Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7（巴黎第七大学（巴黎狄德罗大学））；Université Paris 7（巴黎第七大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université Paris 6（巴黎第六大学）；Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg（阿尔伯特-路德维希-弗莱堡大学）；ENS Lyon（里昂高等师范学院）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；ENS Cachan（卡尚高等师范学院）；Université Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Université de Linköping（林雪平大学）
A constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a computational problem where the input consists of a finite set of variables and a finite set of constraints, and where the task is to decide whether there exists a satisfying assignment of values to the variables. Depending on the type of constraints that we allow in the input, a CSP might be tractable, or computationally hard. In recent years, general criteria have been discovered that imply that a CSP is polynomial-time tractable, or that it is NP-hard. Finite-domain CSPs have become a major common research focus of graph theory, artificial intell…
We study constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) in the presence of counting quantifiers $\exists^{\geq j}$, asserting the existence of $j$ distinct witnesses for the variable in question. As a continuation of our previous (CSR 2012) paper, we focus on the complexity of undirected graph templates. As our main contribution, we settle the two principal open questions proposed in (CSR 2012). Firstly, we complete the classification of clique templates by proving a full trichotomy for all possible combinations of counting quantifiers and clique sizes, placing each case either in P, NP-complete or P…
