In a Merlin–Arthur proof system, the proof verifier (Arthur) accepts valid proofs (from Merlin) with probability 1, and rejects invalid proofs with probability arbitrarily close to 1. The running time of such a system is defined to be the length of Merlin’s proof plus the running time of Arthur. We provide new Merlin–Arthur proof systems for some key problems in fine-grained complexity. In several cases our proof systems have optimal running time. Our main results include: Certifying that a list of Counting the number of Computing the All-Pairs Shortest Distances matrix for an Certifying that an Certifying a Quantified Boolean Formula is true can be done in Merlin–Arthur time
Due to the centrality of these problems in fine-grained complexity, our results have consequences for many other problems of interest. For example, our work implies that certifying there is no Subset Sum solution to
Streaming Verification for Graph Problems: Optimal Tradeoffs and Nonlinear Sketches
We study graph computations in an enhanced data streaming setting, where a space-bounded client reading the edge stream of a massive graph may delegate some of its work to a cloud service. We seek algorithms that allow the client to verify a purported proof sent by the cloud service that the work done in the cloud is correct. A line of work starting with Chakrabarti et al. (ICALP 2009) has provided such algorithms, which we call schemes, for several statistical and graph-theoretic problems, many of which exhibit a tradeoff between the length of the proof and the space used by the streaming verifier.
This work designs new schemes for a number of basic graph problems - including triangle counting, maximum matching, topological sorting, and single-source shortest paths - where past work had either failed to obtain smooth tradeoffs between these two key complexity measures or only obtained suboptimal tradeoffs. Our key innovation is having the verifier compute certain nonlinear sketches of the input stream, leading to either new or improved tradeoffs. In many cases, our schemes, in fact, provide optimal tradeoffs up to logarithmic factors.
Specifically, for most graph problems that we study, it is known that the product of the verifier’s space cost v and the proof length h must be at least Omega(n^2) for n-vertex graphs. However, matching upper bounds are only known for a handful of settings of h and v on the curve h*v = ~Theta(n^2). For example, for counting triangles and maximum matching, schemes with costs lying on this curve are only known for (h = ~O(n²), v = ~O(1)), (h = ~O(n), v = ~O(n)), and the trivial (h = ~O(1), v = ~O(n²)). A major message of this work is that by exploiting nonlinear sketches, a significant "portion" of costs on the tradeoff curve h*v=n^2 can be achieved.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10193031
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Leibniz international proceedings in informatics
- Volume:
- 176
- ISSN:
- 1868-8969
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX/RANDOM.2020.22
