Gap theorems for robust satisfiability: Boolean CSPs and beyond

Abstract

A computational problem exhibits a “gap property” when there is no tractable boundary between two disjoint sets of instances. We establish a Gap Trichotomy Theorem for a family of constraint problem variants, completely classifying the complexity of possible NP-hard gaps in the case of Boolean domains. As a consequence, we obtain a number of dichotomies for the complexity of specific variants of the constraint satisfaction problem: all are either polynomial-time tractable or NP-complete. Schaefer's original dichotomy for SAT variants is a notable particular case.Universal algebraic methods have been central to recent efforts in classifying the complexity of constraint satisfaction problems. A second contribution of the article is to develop aspects of the algebraic approach in the context of a number of variants of the constraint satisfaction problem. In particular, this allows us to lift our results on Boolean domains to many templates on non-Boolean domains.