This article studies two notions of generalized matroid representations motivated by algorithmic information theory and cryptographic secret sharing. The first (entropic representability) involves discrete random variables, while the second (almost-multilinear representability) deals with approximate subspace arrangements. In both cases, we prove that determining whether an input matroid has such a representation is undecidable. Consequently, the conditional independence implication problem is also undecidable, providing an independent answer to a question posed by Geiger and Pearl, recently resolved by Cheuk Ting Li. These problems are also closely related to characterizing achievable rates in network coding and constructing secret sharing schemes. For example, another corollary of our work is that deciding whether an access structure admits an ideal secret sharing scheme is undecidable. Our approach reduces undecidable problems from group theory to matroid representation problems. Specifically, we reduce the uniform word problem for finite groups to entropic representability and the word problem for sofic groups to almost-multilinear representability. A key part of this reduction involves modifying group presentations into forms where linear representations are generic in an appropriate sense when restricted to the generating set.
While there are many parallels between matroid theory and $q$-matroid theory, most notably on the level of cryptomorphisms, there are substantial differences when it comes to the direct sum. The direct sum of $q$-matroids has been introduced in the literature only recently. In this short note we show that the direct sum of representable $q$-matroids may not be representable. It remains an open question whether representability of the direct sum can be characterized by the given $q$-matroids.
It is proved that, for a prime number $p$, showing that an $n$-element matroid is not representable over $GF(p)$ requires only $O(n^2)$ rank evaluations.
We conjecture that it is not possible to finitely axiomatize matroid representability in monadic second-order logic for matroids, and we describe some partial progress towards this conjecture. We present a collection of sentences in monadic second-order logic and show that it is possible to finitely axiomatize matroids using only sentences in this collection. Moreover, we can also axiomatize representability over any fixed finite field (assuming Rota's conjecture holds). We prove that it is not possible to finitely axiomatize representability, or representability over any fixed infinite field,…
We prove that for each prime power $q$ there is an integer $n$ such that if $M$ is a $3$-connected, representable matroid with a PG$(n-1,q)$-minor and no $U_{2,q^2+1}$-minor, then $M$ is representable over GF$(q)$. We also show that for $\ell >= 2$, if $M$ is a $3$-connected, representable matroid of sufficiently high rank with no $U_{2,\ell+2}$-minor and $|E(M)| \geq (4\ell)^{r(M)/2}$, then $M$ is representable over a field of order at most $\ell$.
Every bi-uniform matroid is representable over all sufficiently large fields. But it is not known exactly over which finite fields they are representable, and the existence of efficient methods to find a representation for every given bi-uniform matroid has not been proved. The interest of these problems is due to their implications to secret sharing. The existence of efficient methods to find representations for all bi-uniform matroids is proved here for the first time. The previously known efficient constructions apply only to a particular class of bi-uniform matroids, while the known genera…
For a natural number $c$, a $c$-arrangement is an arrangement of dimension $c$ subspaces satisfying the following condition: the sum of any subset of the subspaces has dimension a multiple of $c$. Matroids arising as normalized rank functions of $c$-arrangements are also known as multilinear matroids. We prove that it is algorithmically undecidable whether there exists a $c$ such that a given matroid has a $c$-arrangement representation, or equivalently whether the matroid is multilinear. It follows that certain network coding problems are also undecidable. In the proof, we introduce a general…
We show that each real-representable matroid is a minor of a complex-representable excluded minor for real-representability. More generally, for an infinite field $\mathbb{F}_1$ and a field extension $\mathbb{F}_2$, if $\mathbb{F}_1$-representability is not equivalent to $\mathbb{F}_2$-representability, then each $\mathbb{F}_1$-representable matroid is a minor of a $\mathbb{F}_2$-representable excluded minor for $\mathbb{F}_1$-representability.
Interaction between skew-representability, tensor products, extension properties, and rank inequalities
ELTE Eötvös Loránd University（罗兰大学）；HUN-REN Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics（匈牙利科学院阿尔弗雷德·雷尼数学研究所）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；London School of Economics and Political Science（伦敦政治经济学院）
The first problem we investigate is the following: given $k\in \mathbb{R}_{\ge 0}$ and a vector $v$ of Plücker coordinates of a point in the real Grassmannian, is the vector obtained by taking the $k$th power of each entry of $v$ again a vector of Plücker coordinates? For $k\neq 1$, this is true if and only if the corresponding matroid is regular. Similar results hold over other fields. We also describe the subvariety of the Grassmannian that consists of all the points that define a regular matroid. The second topic is a related problem for arithmetic matroids. Let $\mathcal{A} = (E, rk, m)$ b…
A Note on an Analytic Approach to the Problem of Finite Matroid Representability, The Cardinality of Sets of k-Independent Vectors over Finite Fields and the Maximum Distance Separable Conjecture
Department of Mathematics, FIZ Karlsruhe Leibnitz Institute for Information Infrastructure（FIZ Karlsruhe莱布尼茨信息基础设施研究所数学系）；Department of Economics, University of Toronto（多伦多大学经济系）
In this paper we give a necessary and sufficient criterion for representability of a matroid over an algebraic closed field. This leads to an algorithm, based on an extension of Groebner Bases, in order to decide if a given matroid is representable over such a field.
We study the representability problem for torsion-free arithmetic matroids. By using a new operation called "reduction" and a "signed Hermite normal form", we provide and implement an algorithm to compute all the representations, up to equivalence. As an application, we disprove two conjectures about the poset of layers and the independence poset of a toric arrangement.
For an integer $n>2$, a rank-$n$ matroid is called an $n$-spike if it consists of $n$ three-point lines through a common point such that, for all $k\in\{1, 2, ..., n - 1\}$, the union of every set of $k$ of these lines has rank $k+1$. Spikes are very special and important in matroid theory. In 2003 Wu found the exact numbers of $n$-spikes over fields with 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 elements, and the asymptotic values for larger finite fields. In this paper, we prove that, for each prime number $p$, a $GF(p$) representable $n$-spike $M$ is only representable on fields with characteristic $p$ provided that $…
We extend the notion of representation of a matroid to algebraic structures that we call skew partial fields. Our definition of such representations extends Tutte's definition, using chain groups. We show how such representations behave under duality and minors, we extend Tutte's representability criterion to this new class, and we study the generator matrices of the chain groups. An example shows that the class of matroids representable over a skew partial field properly contains the class of matroids representable over a skew field. Next, we show that every multilinear representation of a ma…
The Whitney module of a matroid is a natural analogue of the tensor algebra of the exterior algebra of a vector space that takes into account the dependencies of a matroid. In this paper we indicate the role that tableaux can play in describing the Whitney module. We will use our results to describe a basis of the Whitney module of a certain class of matroids known as freedom matroids (also known as Schubert, or shifted matroids). The doubly multilinear submodule of the Whitney module is a representation of the symmetric group. We will describe a formula for the multiplicity of hook shapes in …
It is proved that for each prime field $GF(p)$, there is an integer $f(p)$ such that a 4-connected matroid has at most $f(p)$ inequivalent representations over $GF(p)$. We also prove a stronger theorem that obtains the same conclusion for matroids satisfying a connectivity condition, intermediate between 3-connectivity and 4-connectivity that we term "$k$-coherence". We obtain a variety of other results on inequivalent representations including the following curious one. For a prime power $q$, let ${\mathcal R}(q)$ denote the set of matroids representable over all fields with at least $q$ elem…
Let M be a matroid representable over a (partial) field P and B a matrix representable over a sub-partial field P' of P. We say that B confines M to P' if, whenever a P-representation matrix A of M has a submatrix B, A is a scaled P'-matrix. We show that, under some conditions on the partial fields, on M, and on B, verifying whether B confines M to P' amounts to a finite check. A corollary of this result is Whittle's Stabilizer Theorem. A combination of the Confinement Theorem and the Lift Theorem from arXiv:0804.3263 leads to a short proof of Whittle's characterization of the matroids represe…
A great variety of fundamental optimization and counting problems arising in computer science, mathematics and physics can be reduced to one of the following computational tasks involving polynomials and set systems: given an $m$-variate real polynomial $g$ and a family of subsets $B$ of $[m]$, (1) find $S\in B$ such that the monomial in $g$ corresponding to $S$ has the largest coefficient in $g$, or (2) compute the sum of coefficients of monomials in $g$ corresponding to all the sets in $B$. Special cases of these problems, such as computing permanents, sampling from DPPs and maximizing subde…
