No Arabic abstract
In convex integer programming, various procedures have been developed to strengthen convex relaxations of sets of integer points. On the one hand, there exist several general-purpose methods that strengthen relaxations without specific knowledge of the set $ S $, such as popular linear programming or semi-definite programming hierarchies. On the other hand, various methods have been designed for obtaining strengthened relaxations for very specific sets that arise in combinatorial optimization. We propose a new efficient method that interpolates between these two approaches. Our procedure strengthens any convex set $ Q subseteq mathbb{R}^n $ containing a set $ S subseteq {0,1}^n $ by exploiting certain additional information about $ S $. Namely, the required extra information will be in the form of a Boolean formula $ phi $ defining the target set $ S $. The aim of this work is to analyze various aspects regarding the strength of our procedure. As one result, interpreting an iterated application of our procedure as a hierarchy, our findings simplify, improve, and extend previous results by Bienstock and Zuckerberg on covering problems.
Dimension is a standard and well-studied measure of complexity of posets. Recent research has provided many new upper bounds on the dimension for various structurally restricted classes of posets. Bounded dimension gives a succinct representation of the poset, admitting constant response time for queries of the form is $x<y$?. This application motivates looking for stronger notions of dimension, possibly leading to succinct representations for more general classes of posets. We focus on two: boolean dimension, introduced in the 1980s and revisited in recent research, and local dimension, a very new one. We determine precisely which values of dimension/boolean dimension/local dimension imply that the two other parameters are bounded.
Dependency quantified Boolean formulas (DQBFs) are a powerful formalism, which subsumes quantified Boolean formulas (QBFs) and allows an explicit specification of dependencies of existential variables on universal variables. Driven by the needs of various applications which can be encoded by DQBFs in a natural, compact, and elegant way, research on DQBF solving has emerged in the past few years. However, research focused on closed DQBFs in prenex form (where all quantifiers are placed in front of a propositional formula), while non-prenex DQBFs have almost not been studied in the literature. In this paper, we provide a formal definition for syntax and semantics of non-closed non-prenex DQBFs and prove useful properties enabling quantifier localization. Moreover, we make use of our theory by integrating quantifier localization into a state-of-the-art DQBF solver. Experiments with prenex DQBF benchmarks, including all instances from the QBFEVAL18-20 competitions, clearly show that quantifier localization pays off in this context.
We show that if $fcolon S_n to {0,1}$ is $epsilon$-close to linear in $L_2$ and $mathbb{E}[f] leq 1/2$ then $f$ is $O(epsilon)$-close to a union of mostly disjoint cosets, and moreover this is sharp: any such union is close to linear. This constitutes a sharp Friedgut-Kalai-Naor theorem for the symmetric group. Using similar techniques, we show that if $fcolon S_n to mathbb{R}$ is linear, $Pr[f otin {0,1}] leq epsilon$, and $Pr[f = 1] leq 1/2$, then $f$ is $O(epsilon)$-close to a union of mostly disjoint cosets, and this is also sharp; and that if $fcolon S_n to mathbb{R}$ is linear and $epsilon$-close to ${0,1}$ in $L_infty$ then $f$ is $O(epsilon)$-close in $L_infty$ to a union of disjoint cosets.
We show that a Boolean degree $d$ function on the slice $binom{[n]}{k} = { (x_1,ldots,x_n) in {0,1} : sum_{i=1}^n x_i = k }$ is a junta, assuming that $k,n-k$ are large enough. This generalizes a classical result of Nisan and Szegedy on the hypercube. Moreover, we show that the maximum number of coordinates that a Boolean degree $d$ function can depend on is the same on the slice and the hypercube.
Given $n$ points in the plane, a emph{covering path} is a polygonal path that visits all the points. If no three points are collinear, every covering path requires at least $n/2$ segments, and $n-1$ straight line segments obviously suffice even if the covering path is required to be noncrossing. We show that every set of $n$ points in the plane admits a (possibly self-crossi ng) covering path consisting of $n/2 +O(n/log{n})$ straight line segments. If the path is required to be noncrossing, we prove that $(1-eps)n$ straight line segments suffice for a small constant $eps>0$, and we exhibit $n$-element point sets that require at least $5n/9 -O(1)$ segments in every such path. Further, the analogous question for noncrossing emph{covering trees} is considered and similar bounds are obtained. Finally, it is shown that computing a noncrossing covering path for $n$ points in the plane requires $Omega(n log{n})$ time in the worst case.