Massimo Lauria’s research while affiliated with Sapienza University of Rome and other places

We introduce a novel take on sum-of-squares that is able to reason with complex numbers and still make use of polynomial inequalities. This proof system might be of independent interest since it allows to represent multivalued domains both with Boolean and Fourier encoding. We show degree and size lower bounds in this system for a natural generalization of knapsack: the vanishing sums of roots of unity. These lower bounds naturally apply to polynomial calculus as-well.

We consider the graph k-colouring problem encoded as a set of polynomial equations in the standard way over 0/1-valued variables. We prove that there are bounded-degree graphs that do not have legal k-colourings but for which the polynomial calculus proof system defined in [Clegg et al '96, Alekhnovich et al '02] requires linear degree, and hence exponential size, to establish this fact. This implies a linear degree lower bound for any algorithms based on Gr\"{o}bner bases solving graph k-colouring using this encoding. The same bound applies also for the algorithm studied in a sequence of papers [De Loera et al '08,'09,'11,'15] based on Hilbert's Nullstellensatz proofs for a slightly different encoding, thus resolving an open problem mentioned in [De Loera et al '08,'09,'11] and [Li '16]. We obtain our results by combining the polynomial calculus degree lower bound for functional pigeonhole principle (FPHP) formulas over bounded-degree bipartite graphs in [Mik\v{s}a and Nordstr\"{o}m '15] with a reduction from FPHP to k-colouring derivable by polynomial calculus in constant degree.

We consider the pebble game on DAGs with bounded fan-in introduced in [Paterson and Hewitt '70] and the reversible version of this game in [Bennett '89], and study the question of how hard it is to decide exactly or approximately the number of pebbles needed for a given DAG in these games. We prove that the problem of eciding whether s~pebbles suffice to reversibly pebble a DAG G is PSPACE-complete, as was previously shown for the standard pebble game in [Gilbert, Lengauer and Tarjan '80]. Via two different graph product constructions we then strengthen these results to establish that both standard and reversible pebbling space are PSPACE-hard to approximate to within any additive constant. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first hardness of approximation results for pebble games in an unrestricted setting (even for polynomial time). Also, since [Chan '13] proved that reversible pebbling is equivalent to the games in [Dymond and Tompa '85] and [Raz and McKenzie '99], our results apply to the Dymond--Tompa and Raz--McKenzie games as well, and from the same paper it follows that resolution depth is PSPACE-hard to determine up to any additive constant. We also obtain a multiplicative logarithmic separation between reversible and standard pebbling space. This improves on the additive logarithmic separation previously known and could plausibly be tight, although we are not able to prove this. We leave as an interesting open problem whether our additive hardness of approximation result could be strengthened to a multiplicative bound if the computational resources are decreased from polynomial space to the more common setting of polynomial time.

Proofs in propositional logic are typically presented as trees of derived formulas or, alternatively, as directed acyclic graphs of derived formulas. This distinction between tree-like vs. dag-like structure is particularly relevant when making quantitative considerations regarding, for example, proof size. Here we analyze a more general type of structural restriction for proofs in rule-based proof systems. In this definition, proofs are directed graphs of derived formulas in which cycles are allowed as long as every formula is derived at least as many times as it is required as a premise. We call such proofs “circular”. We show that, for all sets of standard inference rules with single or multiple conclusions, circular proofs are sound. We start the study of the proof complexity of circular proofs at Circular Resolution, the circular version of Resolution. We immediately see that Circular Resolution is stronger than Dag-like Resolution since, as we show, the propositional encoding of the pigeonhole principle has circular Resolution proofs of polynomial size. Furthermore, for derivations of clauses from clauses, we show that Circular Resolution is, surprisingly, equivalent to Sherali-Adams, a proof system for reasoning through polynomial inequalities that has linear programming at its base. As corollaries we get: 1) polynomial-time (LP-based) algorithms that find Circular Resolution proofs of constant width, 2) examples that separate Circular from Dag-like Resolution, such as the pigeonhole principle and its variants, and 3) exponentially hard cases for Circular Resolution. Contrary to the case of Circular Resolution, for Frege we show that circular proofs can be converted into tree-like proofs with at most polynomial overhead.

A partition into distinct parts is refinable if one of its parts a can be replaced by two different integers which do not belong to the partition and whose sum is a, and it is unrefinable otherwise. Clearly, the condition of being unrefinable imposes on the partition a non-trivial limitation on the size of the largest part and on the possible distributions of the parts. We prove a O(n1/2)$O(n^{1/2})$-upper bound for the largest part in an unrefinable partition of n, and we call maximal those which reach the bound. We show a complete classification of maximal unrefinable partitions for triangular numbers, proving that if n is even there exists only one maximal unrefinable partition of n(n+1)/2n(n+1)/2, and that if n is odd the number of such partitions equals the number of partitions of ⌈n/2⌉$\lceil n/2\rceil$ into distinct parts. In the second case, an explicit bijection is provided.

Unrefinable partitions are a subset of partitions into distinct parts which satisfy an additional unrefinability property. More precisely, no parts of such partitions can be written as the sum of different integers which are not parts. We address in this paper the algorithmic aspects related to unrefinable partitions, such as testing whether a given partition is unrefinable or not and enumerating all the partitions whose sum is a given number. We design two algorithms to solve the two mentioned problems and we discuss their complexity.

A partition into distinct parts is refinable if one of its parts a can be replaced by two different integers which do not belong to the partition and whose sum is a, and it is unrefinable otherwise. Clearly, the condition of being unrefinable imposes on the partition a non-trivial limitation on the size of the largest part and on the possible distributions of the parts. We prove a $O(n^{1/2})$-upper bound for the largest part in an unrefinable partition of n, and we call maximal those which reach the bound. We show a complete classification of maximal unrefinable partitions for triangular numbers, proving that if n is even there exists only one maximal unrefinable partition of n(n+1)/2, and that if n is odd the number of such partitions equals the number of partitions of $\lceil n/2\rceil$ into distinct parts. In the second case, an explicit bijection is provided.

We prove that for k ≪ 4√ n regular resolution requires length n Ω( k ) to establish that an Erdős–Rényi graph with appropriately chosen edge density does not contain a k -clique. This lower bound is optimal up to the multiplicative constant in the exponent and also implies unconditional n Ω( k ) lower bounds on running time for several state-of-the-art algorithms for finding maximum cliques in graphs.

We give upper bounds for a positional game – in the sense of Beck – based on the Paris–Harrington Theorem for bi-colorings of graphs and uniform hypergraphs of arbitrary dimension. The bounds for the positional game show a striking difference when compared to the bounds for the combinatorial principle itself. Our results confirm a phenomenon already observed by Beck and others: the upper bounds for the game version of a combinatorial principle are drastically smaller than the upper bounds for the principle itself. In the case of Paris–Harrington games the difference is qualitatively very striking. For example, the bounds for the game on 3-uniform hypergraphs are a fixed stack of exponentials while the bounds for the corresponding combinatorial principle are known to be at least Ackermannian. For higher dimensions, the combinatorial Paris–Harrington numbers are known to be cofinal in the Schwichtenberg–Wainer Hierarchy of fast-growing functions up to the ordinal ε0, while we show that the game Paris–Harrington numbers are bounded by fixed stacks of exponentials.