Stability Dichotomies for Boolean Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Abstract

We study the stability of Boolean constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) through the notion of average sensitivity (Varma and Yoshida, SODA 2021; SICOMP 2023). It measures the expected $1$-Wasserstein distance between an algorithm's output distributions before and after the deletion of a uniformly chosen constraint, using the unnormalized Hamming metric. We establish two dichotomies for every finite Boolean constraint language $Γ$, where $n\geq 2$ denotes the number of variables in an instance. For stable solvability, exactly one of the following holds: $\bullet$ either there is an algorithm that solves $\mathrm{CSP}(Γ)$ and has average sensitivity $O_Γ(1)$ for all satisfiable instances; $\bullet$ or every algorithm that solves $\mathrm{CSP}(Γ)$ has average sensitivity $Ω_Γ(n)$ on satisfiable instances of arbitrarily large $n$. The first alternative holds if and only if $Γ$ has finite duality: unsatisfiability can be witnessed on a bounded number of variables. For stable approximability, where a $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation violates at most an $\varepsilon$-fraction of the constraints in expectation, exactly one of the following holds: $\bullet$ either for every $\varepsilon\in(0,1]$, there is an algorithm that $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximates $\mathrm{CSP}(Γ)$ with average sensitivity $O_Γ(\varepsilon^{-1}\log n)$ for all satisfiable instances; $\bullet$ or there exists $\varepsilon_Γ\in(0,1]$ such that every algorithm that $(1-\varepsilon_Γ)$-approximates $\mathrm{CSP}(Γ)$ has average sensitivity $Ω_Γ(n)$ on satisfiable instances of arbitrarily large $n$. The first alternative holds if and only if $Γ$ has bounded width: local consistency checks on bounded sets of variables detect unsatisfiability.