Sai Sandeep

Conditional dichotomy of Boolean ordered promise CSPs


Promise Constraint Satisfaction Problems (PCSPs) are a generalization of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) where each predicate has a strong and a weak form and given a CSP instance, the objective is to distinguish if the strong form can be satisfied vs. even the weak form cannot be satisfied. There has been a flurry of recent works on PCSPs, including breakthroughs in approximate graph coloring. The key tool in studying PCSPs is the algebraic framework developed in the context of CSPs where the closure properties of the satisfying solutions known as polymorphisms are analyzed.

The polymorphisms of PCSPs are significantly richer than CSPs—this is illustrated by the fact that even in the Boolean case, we still do not know if there exists a dichotomy result for PCSPs analogous to Schaefer’s dichotomy result for CSPs. In this work, we study a special case of Boolean PCSPs, namely Boolean Ordered PCSPs where the Boolean PCSPs have the predicate “x is at most y”. In the algebraic framework, this is the special case of Boolean PCSPs when the polymorphisms are monotone functions. We prove that Boolean Ordered PCSPs exhibit a computational dichotomy assuming the Rich 2-to-1 Conjecture of Braverman, Khot, Minzer which is a perfect completeness surrogate of the Unique Games Conjecture.

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