On the Inapproximability of the Discrete Witsenhausen Problem
It establishes strong inapproximability results for a fundamental control theory problem, extending prior NP-completeness results to approximation hardness.
The paper proves that approximating the optimal strategy for the discrete Witsenhausen problem is NP-hard, showing that for any ε>0, finding a strategy with cost within a factor of n^{2-ε} of optimal is NP-hard.
We consider a discrete version of the Witsenhausen problem where all random variables are bounded and take on integer values. Our main goal is to understand the complexity of computing good strategies given the distributions for the initial state and second-stage noise as inputs to the problem. Following Papadimitriou and Tsitsiklis [1], who showed that computing the optimal solution is NP-complete, we construct a sequence of problem instances with the initial state uniform over a set of size $n$ and the noise uniform over a set of size at most $n^2$, such that finding a strategy whose cost is a multiplicative $n^{2-ε}$ approximation to the optimal cost is NP-hard for any $ε> 0$.