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Register a new userOn the Power and Limitations of Branch and Cut
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Noah Fleming
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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The Stabbing Planes proof system was introduced to model the reasoning carried out in practical mixed integer programming solvers. As a proof system, it is powerful enough to simulate Cutting Planes and to refute the Tseitin formulas -- certain unsatisfiable systems of linear equations mod 2 -- which are canonical hard examples for many algebraic proof systems. In a recent (and surprising) result, Dadush and Tiwari showed that these short refutations of the Tseitin formulas could be translated into quasi-polynomial size and depth Cutting Planes proofs, refuting a long-standing conjecture. This translation raises several interesting questions. First, whether all Stabbing Planes proofs can be efficiently simulated by Cutting Planes. This would allow for the substantial analysis done on the Cutting Planes system to be lifted to practical mixed integer programming solvers. Second, whether the quasi-polynomial depth of these proofs is inherent to Cutting Planes. In this paper we make progress towards answering both of these questions. First, we show that any Stabbing Planes proof with bounded coefficients SP* can be translated into Cutting Planes. As a consequence of the known lower bounds for Cutting Planes, this establishes the first exponential lower bounds on SP*. Using this translation, we extend the result of Dadush and Tiwari to show that Cutting Planes has short refutations of any unsatisfiable system of linear equations over a finite field. Like the Cutting Planes proofs of Dadush and Tiwari, our refutations also incur a quasi-polynomial blow-up in depth, and we conjecture that this is inherent. As a step towards this conjecture, we develop a new geometric technique for proving lower bounds on the depth of Cutting Planes proofs. This allows us to establish the first lower bounds on the depth of Semantic Cutting Planes proofs of the Tseitin formulas.
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Let $G = (V,w)$ be a weighted undirected graph with $m$ edges. The cut dimension of $G$ is the dimension of the span of the characteristic vectors of the minimum cuts of $G$, viewed as vectors in ${0,1}^m$. For every $n ge 2$ we show that the cut dimension of an $n$-vertex graph is at most $2n-3$, and construct graphs realizing this bound. The cut dimension was recently defined by Graur et al. cite{GPRW20}, who show that the maximum cut dimension of an $n$-vertex graph is a lower bound on the number of cut queries needed by a deterministic algorithm to solve the minimum cut problem on $n$-vertex graphs. For every $nge 2$, Graur et al. exhibit a graph on $n$ vertices with cut dimension at least $3n/2 -2$, giving the first lower bound larger than $n$ on the deterministic cut query complexity of computing mincut. We observe that the cut dimension is even a lower bound on the number of emph{linear} queries needed by a deterministic algorithm to solve mincut, where a linear query can ask any vector $x in mathbb{R}^{binom{n}{2}}$ and receives the answer $w^T x$. Our results thus show a lower bound of $2n-3$ on the number of linear queries needed by a deterministic algorithm to solve minimum cut on $n$-vertex graphs, and imply that one cannot show a lower bound larger than this via the cut dimension. We further introduce a generalization of the cut dimension which we call the $ell_1$-approximate cut dimension. The $ell_1$-approximate cut dimension is also a lower bound on the number of linear queries needed by a deterministic algorithm to compute minimum cut. It is always at least as large as the cut dimension, and we construct an infinite family of graphs on $n=3k+1$ vertices with $ell_1$-approximate cut dimension $2n-2$, showing that it can be strictly larger than the cut dimension.
We study the NP-hard textsc{$k$-Sparsest Cut} problem ($k$SC) in which, given an undirected graph $G = (V, E)$ and a parameter $k$, the objective is to partition vertex set into $k$ subsets whose maximum edge expansion is minimized. Herein, the edge expansion of a subset $S subseteq V$ is defined as the sum of the weights of edges exiting $S$ divided by the number of vertices in $S$. Another problem that has been investigated is textsc{$k$-Small-Set Expansion} problem ($k$SSE), which aims to find a subset with minimum edge expansion with a restriction on the size of the subset. We extend previous studies on $k$SC and $k$SSE by inspecting their parameterized complexity. On the positive side, we present two FPT algorithms for both $k$SSE and 2SC problems where in the first algorithm we consider the parameter treewidth of the input graph and uses exponential space, and in the second we consider the parameter vertex cover number of the input graph and uses polynomial space. Moreover, we consider the unweighted version of the $k$SC problem where $k geq 2$ is fixed and proposed two FPT algorithms with parameters treewidth and vertex cover number of the input graph. We also propose a randomized FPT algorithm for $k$SSE when parameterized by $k$ and the maximum degree of the input graph combined. Its derandomization is done efficiently. oindent On the negative side, first we prove that for every fixed integer $k,taugeq 3$, the problem $k$SC is NP-hard for graphs with vertex cover number at most $tau$. We also show that $k$SC is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the treewidth of the input graph and the number~$k$ of components combined using a reduction from textsc{Unary Bin Packing}. Furthermore, we prove that $k$SC remains NP-hard for graphs with maximum degree three and also graphs with degeneracy two. Finally, we prove that the unweighted $k$SSE is W[1]-hard for the parameter $k$.
A stable cut of a graph is a cut whose weight cannot be increased by changing the side of a single vertex. Equivalently, a cut is stable if all vertices have the (weighted) majority of their neighbors on the other side. In this paper we study Min Stable Cut, the problem of finding a stable cut of minimum weight, which is closely related to the Price of Anarchy of the Max Cut game. Since this problem is NP-hard, we study its complexity on graphs of low treewidth, low degree, or both. We show that the problem is weakly NP-hard on severely restricted trees, so bounding treewidth alone cannot make it tractable. We match this with a pseudo-polynomial DP algorithm running in time $(Deltacdot W)^{O(tw)}n^{O(1)}$, where $tw$ is the treewidth, $Delta$ the maximum degree, and $W$ the maximum weight. On the other hand, bounding $Delta$ is also not enough, as the problem is NP-hard for unweighted graphs of bounded degree. We therefore parameterize Min Stable Cut by both $tw+Delta$ and obtain an FPT algorithm running in time $2^{O(Delta tw)}(n+log W)^{O(1)}$. Our main result is to provide a reduction showing that both aforementioned algorithms are essentially optimal, even if we replace treewidth by pathwidth: if there exists an algorithm running in $(nW)^{o(pw)}$ or $2^{o(Delta pw)}(n+log W)^{O(1)}$, then the ETH is false. Complementing this, we show that we can obtain an FPT approximation scheme parameterized by treewidth, if we consider almost-stable solutions. Motivated by these mostly negative results, we consider Unweighted Min Stable Cut. Here our results already imply a much faster exact algorithm running in time $Delta^{O(tw)}n^{O(1)}$. We show that this is also probably essentially optimal: an algorithm running in $n^{o(pw)}$ would contradict the ETH.
We study the performance of local quantum algorithms such as the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) for the maximum cut problem, and their relationship to that of classical algorithms. (1) We prove that every (quantum or classical) one-local algorithm achieves on $D$-regular graphs of girth $> 5$ a maximum cut of at most $1/2 + C/sqrt{D}$ for $C=1/sqrt{2} approx 0.7071$. This is the first such result showing that one-local algorithms achieve a value bounded away from the true optimum for random graphs, which is $1/2 + P_*/sqrt{D} + o(1/sqrt{D})$ for $P_* approx 0.7632$. (2) We show that there is a classical $k$-local algorithm that achieves a value of $1/2 + C/sqrt{D} - O(1/sqrt{k})$ for $D$-regular graphs of girth $> 2k+1$, where $C = 2/pi approx 0.6366$. This is an algorithmic version of the existential bound of Lyons and is related to the algorithm of Aizenman, Lebowitz, and Ruelle (ALR) for the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model. This bound is better than that achieved by the one-local and two-loc
This chapter provides a hands-on tutorial on the important technique known as self-reducibility. Through a series of Challenge Problems that are theorems that the reader will---after being given definitions and tools---try to prove, the tutorial will ask the reader not to read proofs that use self-reducibility, but rather to discover proofs that use self-reducibility. In particular, the chapter will seek to guide the reader to the discovery of proofs of four interesting theorems---whose focus areas range from selectivity to information to approximation---from the literature, whose proofs draw on self-reducibility. The chapters goal is to allow interested readers to add self-reducibility to their collection of proof tools. The chapter simultaneously has a related but different goal, namely, to provide a lesson plan (and a coordinated set of slides is available online to support this use [Hem19]) for a lecture to a two-lecture series that can be given to undergraduate students---even those with no background other than basic discrete mathematics and an understanding of what polynomial-time computation is---to immerse them in hands-on proving, and by doing that, to serve as an invitation to them to take courses on Models of Computation or Complexity Theory.
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