Improved Space Bounds for Subset Sum

Abstract

More than 40 years ago, Schroeppel and Shamir presented an algorithm that solves the Subset Sum problem for n integers in time O^*(2^{0.5n}) and space O^*(2^{0.25n}). The time upper bound remains unbeaten, but the space upper bound has been improved to O^*(2^{0.249999n}) in a recent breakthrough paper by Nederlof and Węgrzycki (STOC 2021). Their algorithm is a clever combination of a number of previously known techniques with a new reduction and a new algorithm for the Orthogonal Vectors problem.
In this paper, we give two new algorithms for Subset Sum. We start by presenting an Arthur-Merlin algorithm: upon receiving the verifier’s randomness, the prover sends an n/4-bit long proof to the verifier who checks it in (deterministic) time and space O^*(2^{n/4}). An interesting consequence of this result is the following fine-grained lower bound: assuming that 4-SUM cannot be solved in time O(n^{2-ε}) for all ε > 0, Circuit SAT cannot be solved in time O(g2^{(1-ε)n}), for all ε > 0 (where n and g denote the number of inputs and the number of gates, respectively).
Then, we improve the space bound by Nederlof and Węgrzycki to O^*(2^{0.246n}) and also simplify their algorithm and its analysis. We achieve this space bound by further filtering sets of subsets using a random prime number. This allows us to reduce an instance of Subset Sum to a larger number of instances of smaller size.