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On the Power of Symmetric Linear Programs.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Atserias, Albert 
Ochremiak, Joanna 

Abstract

We consider families of symmetric linear programs (LPs) that decide a property of graphs (or other relational structures) in the sense that, for each size of graph, there is an LP defining a polyhedral lift that separates the integer points corresponding to graphs with the property from those corresponding to graphs without the property. We show that this is equivalent, with at most polynomial blow-up in size, to families of symmetric Boolean circuits with threshold gates. In particular, when we consider polynomial-size LPs, the model is equivalent to definability in a non-uniform version of fixed-point logic with counting (FPC). Known upper and lower bounds for FPC apply to the non-uniform version. In particular, this implies that the class of graphs with perfect matchings has polynomial-size symmetric LPs while we obtain an exponential lower bound for symmetric LPs for the class of Hamiltonian graphs. We compare and contrast this with previous results (Yannakakis 1991) showing that any symmetric LPs for the matching and TSP polytopes have exponential size. As an application, we establish that for random, uniformly distributed graphs, polynomial-size symmetric LPs are as powerful as general Boolean circuits. We illustrate the effect of this on the well-studied planted-clique problem.

Description

Keywords

Journal Title

J. ACM

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0004-5411

Volume Title

Publisher

ACM

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) Marie Sk?odowska-Curie actions (795936)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/S03238X/1)
Alan Turing Institute (Unknown)