2025/09/16 by C. Ramya, Ramya, C., Pratik Shastri +1
Computer Science · #Computational Complexity (cs.CC) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Formal Methods in Verification #Machine Learning and Algorithms
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.13238
openalex publication_date 2025/09/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The complexity of representing a polynomial by a Read-Once Oblivious Algebraic Branching Program (ROABP) is highly dependent on the chosen variable ordering. Bhargava et al. prove that finding the optimal ordering is NP-hard, and provide some evidence (based on the Small Set Expansion hypothesis) that it is also hard to approximate the optimal ROABP width. In another work, Baraskar et al. show that it is NP-hard to test whether a polynomial is in the GLn orbit of a polynomial of sparsity at most s. Building upon these works, we show the following results: first, we prove that approximating the minimum ROABP width up to any constant factor is NP-hard, when the input is presented as a circuit. This removes the reliance on stronger conjectures in the previous work. Second, we show that testing if an input polynomial given in the sparse representation is in the affine GLn orbit of a width-w ROABP is NP-hard. Furthermore, we show that over fields of characteristic 0, the problem is NP-hard even when the input polynomial is homogeneous. This provides the first NP-hardness results for membership testing for a dense subclass of polynomial sized algebraic branching programs (VBP). Finally, we locate the source of hardness for the order finding problem at the lowest possible non-trivial degree, proving that the problem is NP-hard even for quadratic forms.