Hardness of Graph-Structured Algebraic and Symbolic Problems
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we study the hardness of solving graph-structured linear systems with coefficients over a finite field $\mathbb{Z}_p$ and over a polynomial ring $\mathbb{F}[x_1,\ldots,x_t]$. We reduce solving general linear systems in $\mathbb{Z}_p$ to solving unit-weight low-degree graph Laplacians over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ with a polylogarithmic overhead on the number of non-zeros. Given the hardness of solving general linear systems in $\mathbb{Z}_p$ [Casacuberta-Kyng 2022], this result shows that it is unlikely that we can generalize Laplacian solvers over $\mathbb{R}$, or finite-element based methods over $\mathbb{R}$ in general, to a finite-field setting. We also reduce solving general linear systems over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ to solving linear systems whose coefficient matrices are walk matrices (matrices with all ones on the diagonal) and normalized Laplacians (Laplacians that are also walk matrices) over $\mathbb{Z}_p$. We often need to apply linear system solvers to random linear systems, in which case the worst case analysis above might be less relevant. For example, we often need to substitute variables in a symbolic matrix with random values. Here, a symbolic matrix is simply a matrix whose entries are in a polynomial ring $\mathbb{F}[x_1, \ldots, x_t]$. We formally define the reducibility between symbolic matrix classes, which are classified in terms of the degrees of the entries and the number of occurrences of the variables. We show that the determinant identity testing problem for symbolic matrices with polynomial degree $1$ and variable multiplicity at most $3$ is at least as hard as the same problem for general matrices over $\mathbb{R}$.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it