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1. An Automated Approach to the Collatz Conjecture

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10817-022-09658-8  

   Yolcu, Emre; Aaronson, Scott; Heule, Marijn J. H. (April 2023, Journal of Automated Reasoning)

   Abstract We explore the Collatz conjecture and its variants through the lens of termination of string rewriting. We construct a rewriting system that simulates the iterated application of the Collatz function on strings corresponding to mixed binary–ternary representations of positive integers. We prove that the termination of this rewriting system is equivalent to the Collatz conjecture. We also prove that a previously studied rewriting system that simulates the Collatz function using unary representations does not admit termination proofs via natural matrix interpretations, even when used in conjunction with dependency pairs. To show the feasibility of our approach in proving mathematically interesting statements, we implement a minimal termination prover that uses natural/arctic matrix interpretations and we find automated proofs of nontrivial weakenings of the Collatz conjecture. Although we do not succeed in proving the Collatz conjecture, we believe that the ideas here represent an interesting new approach. 

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2. A New Conjecture on Hardness of 2-CSP's with Implications to Hardness of Densest k-Subgraph and Other Problems

   Chuzhoy, Julia; Dalirrooyfard, Mina; Grinberg, Vadim; Tan, Zihan. (January 2023, Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   We propose a new conjecture on hardness of 2-CSP’s, and show that new hardness of approximation results for Densest k-Subgraph and several other problems, including a graph partitioning problem, and a variation of the Graph Crossing Number problem, follow from this conjecture. The conjecture can be viewed as occupying a middle ground between the d-to-1 conjecture, and hardness results for 2-CSP’s that can be obtained via standard techniques, such as Parallel Repetition combined with standard 2-prover protocols for the 3SAT problem. We hope that this work will motivate further exploration of hardness of 2-CSP’s in the regimes arising from the conjecture. We believe that a positive resolution of the conjecture will provide a good starting point for other hardness of approximation proofs. Another contribution of our work is proving that the problems that we consider are roughly equivalent from the approximation perspective. Some of these problems arose in previous work, from which it appeared that they may be related to each other. We formalize this relationship in this work. 

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3. Almost-Sure Termination by Guarded Refinement

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3674632  

   Gregersen, Simon Oddershede; Aguirre, Alejandro; Haselwarter, Philipp G; Tassarotti, Joseph; Birkedal, Lars (August 2024, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages)

   Almost-sure termination is an important correctness property for probabilistic programs, and a number of program logics have been developed for establishing it. However, these logics have mostly been developed for first-order programs written in languages with specific syntactic patterns for looping. In this paper, we consider almost-sure termination for higher-order probabilistic programs with general references. This combination of features allows for recursion and looping to be encoded through a variety of patterns. Therefore, rather than developing proof rules for reasoning about particular recursion patterns, we instead propose an approach based on proving refinement between a higher-order program and a simpler probabilistic model, in such a way that the refinement preserves termination behavior. By proving a refinement, almost-sure termination behavior of the program can then be established by analyzing the simpler model. We present this approach in the form of Caliper, a higher-order separation logic for proving termination-preserving refinements. Caliper uses probabilistic couplings to carry out relational reasoning between a program and a model. To handle the range of recursion patterns found in higher-order programs, Caliper uses guarded recursion, in particular the principle of Löb induction. A technical novelty is that Caliper does not require the use of transfinite step indexing or other technical restrictions found in prior work on guarded recursion for termination-preservation refinement. We demonstrate the flexibility of this approach by proving almost-sure termination of several examples, including first-order loop constructs, a random list generator, treaps, and a sampler for Galton-Watson trees that uses higher-order store. All the results have been mechanized in the Coq proof assistant. 

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4. KRW Composition Theorems via Lifting

   de Rezende, Susanna F; Meir, O; Nordström, J; Pitassi, T; Robere, R. (July 2020, Electronic colloquium on computational complexity)

   One of the major open problems in complexity theory is proving super-logarithmic lower bounds on the depth of circuits (i.e., P 6⊆ NC1). Karchmer, Raz, and Wigderson [KRW95] suggested to approach this problem by proving that depth complexity behaves “as expected” with respect to the composition of functions f ⋄ g. They showed that the validity of this conjecture would imply that P 6⊆ NC^1 . Several works have made progress toward resolving this conjecture by proving special cases. In particular, these works proved the KRW conjecture for every outer function f, but only for few inner functions g. Thus, it is an important challenge to prove the KRW conjecture for a wider range of inner functions. In this work, we extend significantly the range of inner functions that can be handled. First, we consider the monotone version of the KRW conjecture. We prove it for every monotone inner function g whose depth complexity can be lower bounded via a query-to-communication lifting theorem. This allows us to handle several new and well-studied functions such as the s-t-connectivity, clique, and generation functions. In order to carry this progress back to the non-monotone setting, we introduce a new notion of semi-monotone composition, which combines the non-monotone complexity of the outer function f with the monotone complexity of the inner function g. In this setting, we prove the KRW conjecture for a similar selection of inner functions g, but only for a specific choice of the outer function f. 

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5. On correlation bounds against polynomials Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs):38th Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2023)

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2023.3  

   Ivanov, Peter; Pavlovic, Liam; Viola, Emanuele (January 2023, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)

   Ta-Shma, Amnon (Ed.)

   We study the fundamental challenge of exhibiting explicit functions that have small correlation with low-degree polynomials over 𝔽₂. Our main contributions include: 1) In STOC 2020, CHHLZ introduced a new technique to prove correlation bounds. Using their technique they established new correlation bounds for low-degree polynomials. They conjectured that their technique generalizes to higher degree polynomials as well. We give a counterexample to their conjecture, in fact ruling out weaker parameters and showing what they prove is essentially the best possible. 2) We propose a new approach for proving correlation bounds with the central "mod functions," consisting of two steps: (I) the polynomials that maximize correlation are symmetric and (II) symmetric polynomials have small correlation. Contrary to related results in the literature, we conjecture that (I) is true. We argue this approach is not affected by existing "barrier results." 3) We prove our conjecture for quadratic polynomials. Specifically, we determine the maximum possible correlation between quadratic polynomials modulo 2 and the functions (x_1,… ,x_n) → z^{∑ x_i} for any z on the complex unit circle, and show that it is achieved by symmetric polynomials. To obtain our results we develop a new proof technique: we express correlation in terms of directional derivatives and analyze it by slowly restricting the direction. 4) We make partial progress on the conjecture for cubic polynomials, in particular proving tight correlation bounds for cubic polynomials whose degree-3 part is symmetric. 

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