78.7DSMay 13
Non-Redundancy of Low-Arity Symmetric Boolean CSPsAmatya Sharma, Santhoshini Velusamy
Non-redundancy, introduced by Bessiere, Carbonnel, and Katsirelos (AAAI 2020), is a structural parameter for Constraint Satisfaction Problems ($\mathsf{CSPs}$) that governs kernelization, exact and approximate sparsification, and exact streaming complexity. It is the largest size of a $\mathsf{CSP}$ instance admitting no smaller subinstance with the same satisfying assignments. We study non-redundancy $\mathsf{NRD}_n(R)$ for Boolean symmetric $\mathsf{CSPs}$ defined by an $r$-ary relation $R$ whose value depends only on Hamming weight. An instance of $\mathsf{CSP}(R)$ has $n$ variables and constraints given by $r$-tuples; a constraint is satisfied exactly when the induced tuple lies in $R$. This class includes natural predicates such as cuts and $k$-SAT clauses. Our main result is a near-complete classification of the asymptotic growth of $\mathsf{NRD}_n(R)$ for symmetric Boolean predicates of arity at most $5$. Using computational experiments and algebraic upper- and lower-bound criteria, we resolve every predicate of arity at most $4$ and all but two predicates of arity $5$. For upper bounds, we introduce $t$-balancedness, a lifted, higher-degree version of the balancedness notion of Chen, Jansen, and Pieterse (Algorithmica 2020). We prove that $t$-balancedness is equivalent to the existence of degree-$t$ multilinear polynomials capturing $R$, and hence implies $\mathsf{NRD}_n(R)=O(n^t)$. For lower bounds, we use Carbonnel's (CP 2022) framework: predicates admitting a special reduction from $k$-ary OR inherit OR's lower bound $Ω(n^k)$. The only unresolved arity-$5$ predicates in our framework have bounds $Ω(n^2)$ and $O(n^3)$; we reduce their exact classification to natural extremal set-system questions.
70.4DSApr 23
Characterizing Streaming Decidability of CSPs via Non-RedundancyAmatya Sharma, Santhoshini Velusamy
We study the single-pass streaming complexity of deciding satisfiability of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). A CSP is specified by a constraint language $Γ$, that is, a finite set of $k$-ary relations over the domain $[q] = \{0, \dots, q-1\}$. An instance of $\mathsf{CSP}(Γ)$ consists of $m$ constraints over $n$ variables $x_1, \ldots, x_n$ taking values in $[q]$. Each constraint $C_i$ is of the form $\{R_i,(x_{i_1} + λ_{i_1}, \ldots, x_{i_k} + λ_{i_k})\}$, where $R_i \in Γ$ and $λ_{i_1}, \ldots, λ_{i_k} \in [q]$ are constants; it is satisfied if and only if $(x_{i_1} + λ_{i_1}, \ldots, x_{i_k} + λ_{i_k}) \in R_i$, where addition is modulo $q$. In the streaming model, constraints arrive one by one, and the goal is to determine, using minimum memory, whether there exists an assignment satisfying all constraints. For $k$-SAT, Vu (TCS 2024) proves an optimal $Ω(n^k)$ space lower bound, while for general CSPs, Chou, Golovnev, Sudan, and Velusamy (JACM 2024) establish an $Ω(n)$ lower bound; a complete characterization has remained open. We close this gap by showing that the single-pass streaming space complexity of $\mathsf{CSP}(Γ)$ is precisely governed by its non-redundancy, a structural parameter introduced by Bessiere, Carbonnel, and Katsirelos (AAAI 2020). The non-redundancy $\mathsf{NRD}_n(Γ)$ is the maximum number of constraints over $n$ variables such that every constraint $C$ is non-redundant, i.e., there exists an assignment satisfying all constraints except $C$. We prove that the single-pass streaming complexity of $\mathsf{CSP}(Γ)$ is characterized, up to a logarithmic factor, by $\mathsf{NRD}_n(Γ)$.