Average-Case Hardness of Binary-Encoded Clique in Proof and Communication Complexity
cstheory.com
May 12, 2026
Authors: Susanna F. de Rezende, David Engström, Yassine Ghannane, Duri Andrea Janett, Artur Riazanov
We study the average-case hardness of establishing that a graph does not have a large clique in both proof and communication complexity. We show exponential lower bounds on the length of cutting planes and bounded-depth resolution over parities refutations of the binary encoding of clique formulas on randomly sampled dense graphs. Moreover, we show that the randomized communication complexity of finding a falsified clause in these formulas is polynomial.
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