We investigate the relation between δ and ε required for obtaining a (1+δ)-approximation in time N^{2-ε} for closest pair problems under various distance metrics, and for other related problems in fine-grained complexity. Specifically, our main result shows that if it is impossible to (exactly) solve the (bichromatic) inner product (IP) problem for vectors of dimension c log N in time N^{2-ε}, then there is no (1+δ)-approximation algorithm for (bichromatic) Euclidean Closest Pair running in time N^{2-2ε}, where δ ≈ (ε/c)² (where ≈ hides polylog factors). This improves on the prior result due to Chen and Williams (SODA 2019) which gave a smaller polynomial dependence of δ on ε, on the order of δ ≈ (ε/c)⁶. Our result implies in turn that no (1+δ)-approximation algorithm exists for Euclidean closest pair for δ ≈ ε⁴, unless an algorithmic improvement for IP is obtained. This in turn is very close to the approximation guarantee of δ ≈ ε³ for Euclidean closest pair, given by the best known algorithm of Almam, Chan, and Williams (FOCS 2016). By known reductions, a similar result follows for a host of other related problems in fine-grained hardness of approximation. Our reduction combines the hardness of approximation framework of Chen and Williams, together with an MA communication protocol for IP over a small alphabet, that is inspired by the MA protocol of Chen (Theory of Computing, 2020).
@InProceedings{abboud_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.7, author = {Abboud, Elie and Ron-Zewi, Noga}, title = {{Finer-Grained Reductions in Fine-Grained Hardness of Approximation}}, booktitle = {51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2024)}, pages = {7:1--7:17}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-322-5}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2024}, volume = {297}, editor = {Bringmann, Karl and Grohe, Martin and Puppis, Gabriele and Svensson, Ola}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.7}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-201507}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.7}, annote = {Keywords: Fine-grained complexity, conditional lower bound, fine-grained reduction, Approximation algorithms, Analysis of algorithms, Computational geometry, Computational and structural complexity theory} }
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