Dimension results for extremal-generic polynomial systems over complete toric varieties

Abstract

We study polynomial systems with prescribed monomial supports in the Cox ring of a toric variety built from a complete polyhedral fan. We present combinatorial formulas for the dimension of their associated subvarieties under genericity assumptions on the coefficients of the polynomials. Using these formulas, we identify at which degrees generic systems in polytopal algebras form regular sequences. Our motivation comes from sparse elimination theory, where knowing the expected dimension of these subvarieties leads to specialized algorithms and to large speed-ups for solving sparse polynomial systems. As a special case, we classify the degrees at which regular sequences defined by weighted homogeneous polynomials can be found, answering an open question in the Gröbner bases literature. We also show that deciding whether a sparse system is generically a regular sequence in a polytopal algebra is hard from the point of view of theoretical computational complexity.