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1. Lower Bounds Against Sparse Symmetric Functions of ACC Circuits: Expanding the Reach of #SAT Algorithms

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-022-10106-8  

   Vyas, Nikhil ; Williams, R. Ryan ( November 2022 , Theory of Computing Systems)

   We continue the program of proving circuit lower bounds via circuit satisfiability algorithms. So far, this program has yielded several concrete results, proving that functions in$\mathsf {Quasi}\text {-}\mathsf {NP} = \mathsf {NTIME}[n^{(\log n)^{O(1)}}]$$\mathrm{Quasi}-\mathrm{NP}=\mathrm{NTIME}\left[n^{{\left(\log n\right)}^{O\left(1\right)}}\right]$and other complexity classes do not have small circuits (in the worst case and/or on average) from various circuit classes$\mathcal { C}$$C$, by showing that$\mathcal { C}$$C$admits non-trivial satisfiability and/or#SAT algorithms which beat exhaustive search by a minor amount. In this paper, we present a new strong lower bound consequence of having a non-trivial#SAT algorithm for a circuit class${\mathcal C}$$C$. Say that a symmetric Boolean functionf(x₁,…,x_n) issparseif it outputs 1 onO(1) values of${\sum }_{i} x_{i}$${\sum }_i{x}_i$. We show that for every sparsef, and for all “typical”$\mathcal { C}$$C$, faster#SAT algorithms for$\mathcal { C}$$C$circuits imply lower bounds against the circuit class$f \circ \mathcal { C}$$f\circ C$, which may bestrongerthan$\mathcal { C}$$C$itself. In particular:

   #SAT algorithms forn^k-size$\mathcal { C}$$C$-circuits running in 2ⁿ/n^ktime (for allk) implyNEXPdoes not have$(f \circ \mathcal { C})$$(f\circ C)$-circuits of polynomial size.

   #SAT algorithms for$2^{n^{{\varepsilon }}}$$2^{n^{\epsilon }}$-size$\mathcal { C}$$C$-circuits running in$2^{n-n^{{\varepsilon }}}$$2^{n-n^{\epsilon }}$time (for someε> 0) implyQuasi-NPdoes not have$(f \circ \mathcal { C})$$(f\circ C)$-circuits of polynomial size.

   Applying#SAT algorithms from the literature, one immediate corollary of our results is thatQuasi-NPdoes not haveEMAJ∘ACC⁰∘THRcircuits of polynomialmore »size, whereEMAJis the “exact majority” function, improving previous lower bounds againstACC⁰[Williams JACM’14] andACC⁰∘THR[Williams STOC’14], [Murray-Williams STOC’18]. This is the first nontrivial lower bound against such a circuit class.

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2. The White-Box Adversarial Data Stream Model

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3517804.3526228  

   Ajtai, M. ; Braverman, V. ; Jayram, T.S. ; Silwal, S. ; Sun, A. ; Woodruff, D.P. ; Zhou, S. ( January 2022 , Proceedings of the 41st ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS 2022))

   There has been a flurry of recent literature studying streaming algorithms for which the input stream is chosen adaptively by a black-box adversary who observes the output of the streaming algorithm at each time step. However, these algorithms fail when the adversary has access to the internal state of the algorithm, rather than just the output of the algorithm. We study streaming algorithms in the white-box adversarial model, where the stream is chosen adaptively by an adversary who observes the entire internal state of the algorithm at each time step. We show that nontrivial algorithms are still possible. We first give a randomized algorithm for the L1-heavy hitters problem that outperforms the optimal deterministic Misra-Gries algorithm on long streams. If the white-box adversary is computationally bounded, we use cryptographic techniques to reduce the memory of our L1-heavy hitters algorithm even further and to design a number of additional algorithms for graph, string, and linear algebra problems. The existence of such algorithms is surprising, as the streaming algorithm does not even have a secret key in this model, i.e., its state is entirely known to the adversary. One algorithm we design is for estimating the number of distinct elements in amore »stream with insertions and deletions achieving a multiplicative approximation and sublinear space; such an algorithm is impossible for deterministic algorithms. We also give a general technique that translates any two-player deterministic communication lower bound to a lower bound for randomized algorithms robust to a white-box adversary. In particular, our results show that for all p ≥ 0, there exists a constant Cp > 1 such that any Cp-approximation algorithm for Fp moment estimation in insertion-only streams with a white-box adversary requires Ω(n) space for a universe of size n. Similarly, there is a constant C > 1 such that any C-approximation algorithm in an insertion-only stream for matrix rank requires Ω(n) space with a white-box adversary. These results do not contradict our upper bounds since they assume the adversary has unbounded computational power. Our algorithmic results based on cryptography thus show a separation between computationally bounded and unbounded adversaries. Finally, we prove a lower bound of Ω(log n) bits for the fundamental problem of deterministic approximate counting in a stream of 0’s and 1’s, which holds even if we know how many total stream updates we have seen so far at each point in the stream. Such a lower bound for approximate counting with additional information was previously unknown, and in our context, it shows a separation between multiplayer deterministic maximum communication and the white-box space complexity of a streaming algorithm« less
3. Entropic independence: optimal mixing of down-up random walks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3519935.3520048  

   Anari, Nima ; Jain, Vishesh ; Koehler, Frederic ; Pham, Huy Tuan ; Vuong, Thuy-Duong ( June 2022 , Proceedings of the 54th Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing)

   We introduce a notion called entropic independence that is an entropic analog of spectral notions of high-dimensional expansion. Informally, entropic independence of a background distribution $\mu$ on $k$-sized subsets of a ground set of elements says that for any (possibly randomly chosen) set $S$, the relative entropy of a single element of $S$ drawn uniformly at random carries at most $O(1/k)$ fraction of the relative entropy of $S$. Entropic independence is the analog of the notion of spectral independence, if one replaces variance by entropy. We use entropic independence to derive tight mixing time bounds, overcoming the lossy nature of spectral analysis of Markov chains on exponential-sized state spaces. In our main technical result, we show a general way of deriving entropy contraction, a.k.a. modified log-Sobolev inequalities, for down-up random walks from spectral notions. We show that spectral independence of a distribution under arbitrary external fields automatically implies entropic independence. We furthermore extend our theory to the case where spectral independence does not hold under arbitrary external fields. To do this, we introduce a framework for obtaining tight mixing time bounds for Markov chains based on what we call restricted modified log-Sobolev inequalities, which guarantee entropy contraction not for allmore »distributions, but for those in a sufficiently large neighborhood of the stationary distribution. To derive our results, we relate entropic independence to properties of polynomials: $\mu$ is entropically independent exactly when a transformed version of the generating polynomial of $\mu$ is upper bounded by its linear tangent; this property is implied by concavity of the said transformation, which was shown by prior work to be locally equivalent to spectral independence. We apply our results to obtain (1) tight modified log-Sobolev inequalities and mixing times for multi-step down-up walks on fractionally log-concave distributions, (2) the tight mixing time of $O(n\log n)$ for Glauber dynamics on Ising models whose interaction matrix has eigenspectrum lying within an interval of length smaller than $1$, improving upon the prior quadratic dependence on $n$, and (3) nearly-linear time $\widetilde O_{\delta}(n)$ samplers for the hardcore and Ising models on $n$-node graphs that have $\delta$-relative gap to the tree-uniqueness threshold. In the last application, our bound on the running time does not depend on the maximum degree $\Delta$ of the graph, and is therefore optimal even for high-degree graphs, and in fact, is sublinear in the size of the graph for high-degree graphs.« less
4. Can We Break Symmetry with o(m) Communication?

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3465084  

   Pai, Shreyas ; Pandurangan, Gopal ; Pemmaraju, Sriram ; Robinson, Peter ( July 2021 , PODC'21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing)

   We study the communication cost (or message complexity) of fundamental distributed symmetry breaking problems, namely, coloring and MIS. While significant progress has been made in understanding and improving the running time of such problems, much less is known about the message complexity of these problems. In fact, all known algorithms need at least Ω(m) communication for these problems, where m is the number of edges in the graph. We addressthe following question in this paper: can we solve problems such as coloring and MIS using sublinear, i.e., o(m) communication, and if sounder what conditions? In a classical result, Awerbuch, Goldreich, Peleg, and Vainish [JACM 1990] showed that fundamental global problems such asbroadcast and spanning tree construction require at least o(m) messages in the KT-1 Congest model (i.e., Congest model in which nodes have initial knowledge of the neighbors' ID's) when algorithms are restricted to be comparison-based (i.e., algorithms inwhich node ID's can only be compared). Thirty five years after this result, King, Kutten, and Thorup [PODC 2015] showed that onecan solve the above problems using Õ(n) messages (n is the number of nodes in the graph) in Õ(n) rounds in the KT-1 Congest model if non-comparison-based algorithms are permitted. Anmore »important implication of this result is that one can use the synchronous nature of the KT-1 Congest model, using silence to convey information,and solve any graph problem using non-comparison-based algorithms with Õ(n) messages, but this takes an exponential number of rounds. In the asynchronous model, even this is not possible. In contrast, much less is known about the message complexity of local symmetry breaking problems such as coloring and MIS. Our paper fills this gap by presenting the following results. Lower bounds: In the KT-1 CONGEST model, we show that any comparison-based algorithm, even a randomized Monte Carlo algorithm with constant success probability, requires Ω(n 2) messages in the worst case to solve either (△ + 1)-coloring or MIS, regardless of the number of rounds. We also show that Ω(n) is a lower bound on the number ofmessages for any (△ + 1)-coloring or MIS algorithm, even non-comparison-based, and even with nodes having initial knowledge of up to a constant radius. Upper bounds: In the KT-1 CONGEST model, we present the following randomized non-comparison-based algorithms for coloring that, with high probability, use o(m) messages and run in polynomially many rounds.(a) A (△ + 1)-coloring algorithm that uses Õ(n1.5) messages, while running in Õ(D + √ n) rounds, where D is the graph diameter. Our result also implies an asynchronous algorithm for (△ + 1)-coloring with the same message bound but running in Õ(n) rounds. (b) For any constantε > 0, a (1+ε)△-coloring algorithm that uses Õ(n/ε 2 ) messages, while running in Õ(n) rounds. If we increase our input knowledge slightly to radius 2, i.e.,in the KT-2 CONGEST model, we obtain:(c) A randomized comparison-based MIS algorithm that uses Õ(n 1.5) messages. while running in Õ( √n) rounds. While our lower bound results can be viewed as counterparts to the classical result of Awerbuch, Goldreich, Peleg, and Vainish [JACM 90], but for local problems, our algorithms are the first-known algorithms for coloring and MIS that take o(m) messages and run in polynomially many rounds.« less
5. Adversarially Robust Coloring for Graph Streams

   Chakrabarti, Amit ; Ghosh, Prantar ; Stoeckl, Manuel ( January 2022 , Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   A streaming algorithm is considered to be adversarially robust if it provides correct outputs with high probability even when the stream updates are chosen by an adversary who may observe and react to the past outputs of the algorithm. We grow the burgeoning body of work on such algorithms in a new direction by studying robust algorithms for the problem of maintaining a valid vertex coloring of an n-vertex graph given as a stream of edges. Following standard practice, we focus on graphs with maximum degree at most Δ and aim for colorings using a small number f(Δ) of colors. A recent breakthrough (Assadi, Chen, and Khanna; SODA 2019) shows that in the standard, non-robust, streaming setting, (Δ+1)-colorings can be obtained while using only Õ(n) space. Here, we prove that an adversarially robust algorithm running under a similar space bound must spend almost Ω(Δ²) colors and that robust O(Δ)-coloring requires a linear amount of space, namely Ω(nΔ). We in fact obtain a more general lower bound, trading off the space usage against the number of colors used. From a complexity-theoretic standpoint, these lower bounds provide (i) the first significant separation between adversarially robust algorithms and ordinary randomized algorithms for amore »natural problem on insertion-only streams and (ii) the first significant separation between randomized and deterministic coloring algorithms for graph streams, since deterministic streaming algorithms are automatically robust. We complement our lower bounds with a suite of positive results, giving adversarially robust coloring algorithms using sublinear space. In particular, we can maintain an O(Δ²)-coloring using Õ(n √Δ) space and an O(Δ³)-coloring using Õ(n) space.« less