Small Promise CSPs that reduce to large CSPs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complexity of Promise CSPs, showing that reductions to tractable CSPs may require arbitrarily large structures, but for graph cases, such reductions imply tractability of the original problem.

Contribution

It constructs families of PCSPs requiring large structures for reduction and proves that for graph PCSPs, such reductions imply tractability of the original problem.

Findings

Reductions to finite CSPs may involve arbitrarily large structures.

For graph PCSPs, such reductions imply the original PCSP is tractable.

Constructed examples demonstrate the necessity of large structures in reductions.

Abstract

For relational structures A, B of the same signature, the Promise Constraint Satisfaction Problem PCSP(A,B) asks whether a given input structure maps homomorphically to A or does not even map to B. We are promised that the input satisfies exactly one of these two cases. If there exists a structure C with homomorphisms $A\to C\to B$, then PCSP(A,B) reduces naturally to CSP(C). To the best of our knowledge all known tractable PCSPs reduce to tractable CSPs in this way. However Barto showed that some PCSPs over finite structures A, B require solving CSPs over infinite C. We show that even when such a reduction to finite C is possible, this structure may become arbitrarily large. For every integer $n>1$ and every prime p we give A, B of size n with a single relation of arity $n^p$ such that PCSP(A, B) reduces via a chain of homomorphisms $ A\to C\to B$ to a tractable CSP over some C of size p but not over any smaller structure. In a second family of examples, for every prime $p\geq 7$ we construct A, B of size $p-1$ with a single ternary relation such that PCSP(A, B) reduces via $A\to C\to B$ to a tractable CSP over some C of size p but not over any smaller structure. In contrast we show that if A, B are graphs and PCSP(A,B) reduces to tractable CSP(C) for some finite digraph C, then already A or B has a tractable CSP. This extends results and answers a question of Deng et al.