Optimal Communication Complexity of Chained Index

Author Janani Sundaresan



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Janani Sundaresan
  • Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada

Acknowledgements

The author is thankful to Sepehr Assadi for introducing them to the problem and for insightful discussions on the proof. The author would also like to thank Parth Mittal for useful comments, Christian Konrad for introducing them to the Augmented Chain problem, and the anonymous reviewers of ITCS 2025 for helpful comments and suggestions. The author is very grateful to Mi-Ying Huang, Xinyu Mao, Guangxu Yang and Jiapeng Zhang for an illuminating discussion about the problem. They pointed out an important flaw in an earlier version of this work, and the discussion was instrumental for the new proofs in the current version.

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Janani Sundaresan. Optimal Communication Complexity of Chained Index. In 16th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 325, pp. 89:1-89:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2025.89

Abstract

We study the chain communication problem introduced by Cormode et al. [ICALP 2019]. For k ≥ 1, in the chain_{n,k} problem, there are k string and index pairs (X_i, σ_i) for i ∈ [k] such that the value at position σ_i in string X_i is the same bit for all k pairs. The input is shared between k+1 players as follows. Player 1 has the first string X₁ ∈ {0,1}ⁿ, player 2 has the first index σ₁ ∈ [n] and the second string X₂ ∈ {0,1}ⁿ, player 3 has the second index σ₂ ∈ [n] along with the third string X₃ ∈ {0,1}ⁿ, and so on. Player k+1 has the last index σ_k ∈ [n]. The communication is one way from each player to the next, starting from player 1 to player 2, then from player 2 to player 3 and so on. Player k+1, after receiving the message from player k, has to output a single bit which is the value at position σ_i in X_i for any i ∈ [k]. It is a generalization of the well-studied index problem, which is equivalent to chain_{n, 2}.
Cormode et al. proved that the chain_{n,k} problem requires Ω(n/k²) communication, and they used it to prove streaming lower bounds for the approximation of maximum independent sets. Subsequently, Feldman et al. [STOC 2020] used it to prove lower bounds for streaming submodular maximization. However, it is not known whether the Ω(n/k²) lower bound used in these works is optimal for the problem, and in fact, it was conjectured by Cormode et al. that Ω(n) bits are necessary. 
We prove the optimal lower bound of Ω(n) for chain_{n,k} when k = o(n/log n) as our main result. This settles the open conjecture of Cormode et al., barring the range of k = Ω(n /log n). The main technique is a reduction to a non-standard index problem where the input to the players is such that the answer is biased away from uniform. This biased version of index is analyzed using tools from information theory. As a corollary, we get an improved lower bound for approximation of maximum independent set in vertex arrival streams via a reduction from chain directly.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Communication complexity
Keywords
  • communication complexity
  • index communciation problem

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