Playing unique games on certified small-set expanders

DOI10.1145/3406325.3451099MaRDI QIDQ6065280zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Mitali Bafna, Boaz Barak, Pravesh Kothari, Tselil Schramm, David Steurer

Publication date 14 November 2023

Published in Proceedings of the 53rd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.09969

zbMATH Keywords

approximation algorithmscomputational complexity theorysum of squares algorithmsunique games conjecture

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Theory of computing (68Qxx)

Abstract: 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.

Cited in

(8)

• How to Play Unique Games on Expanders
• Hypercontractivity for global functions and sharp thresholds
• Sum-of-squares lower bounds for densest k-subgraph
• The moment-SOS hierarchy: applications and related topics
• Small-set expansion in the Johnson graph
• Solving unique games over globally hypercontractive graphs
• Min-CSPs on complete instances. II: Polylogarithmic approximation for Min-NAE-3-SAT
• Sparsest cut and eigenvalue multiplicities on low degree abelian Cayley graphs

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