Playing Unique Games on Certified Small-Set Expanders


Abstract in English

We give an algorithm for solving unique games (UG) instances whenever low-degree sum-of-squares proofs certify good bounds on the small-set-expansion of the underlying constraint graph via a hypercontractive inequality. Our algorithm is in fact more versatile, and succeeds even when the constraint graph is not a small-set expander as long as the structure of non-expanding small sets is (informally speaking) characterized by a low-degree sum-of-squares proof. Our results are obtained by rounding emph{low-entropy} solutions -- measured via a new global potential function -- to sum-of-squares (SoS) semidefinite programs. This technique adds to the (currently short) list of general tools for analyzing SoS relaxations for emph{worst-case} optimization problems. As corollaries, we obtain the first polynomial-time algorithms for solving any UG instance where the constraint graph is either the emph{noisy hypercube}, the emph{short code} or the emph{Johnson} graph. The prior best algorithm for such instances was the eigenvalue enumeration algorithm of Arora, Barak, and Steurer (2010) which requires quasi-polynomial time for the noisy hypercube and nearly-exponential time for the short code and Johnson graphs. All of our results achieve an approximation of $1-epsilon$ vs $delta$ for UG instances, where $epsilon>0$ and $delta > 0$ depend on the expansion parameters of the graph but are independent of the alphabet size.

Download