The thesis summarizes known results in the field of NP search problems. We discuss the complexity of integer factoring in detail, and we propose new results which place the problem in known classes and aim to separate it from PLS in some sense. Furthermore, we define several new search problems.

Local search proved to be an extremely useful tool when facing hard optimization problems (e.g. via the simplex algorithm, simulated annealing, or genetic algorithms). Although powerful, it has its limitations: there are functions for which exponentially many queries are needed to find a local optimum. In many contexts the optimization ... more >>>

The class TFNP is the search analog of NP with the additional guarantee that any instance has a solution. TFNP has attracted extensive attention due to its natural syntactic subclasses that capture the computational complexity of important search problems from algorithmic game theory, combinatorial optimization and computational topology. Thus, one ... more >>>

Ramsey theory assures us that in any graph there is a clique or independent set of a certain size, roughly logarithmic in the graph size. But how difficult is it to find the clique or independent set? If the graph is given explicitly, then it is possible to do so ... more >>>

The complexity class TFNP is the set of {\em total function} problems that belong to NP: every input has at least one output and outputs are easy to check for validity, but it may be hard to find an output. TFNP is not believed to have complete problems, but it ... more >>>

The complexity class PPAD is usually defined in terms of the END-OF-LINE problem, in which we are given a concise representation of a large directed graph having indegree and outdegree at most 1, and a known source, and we seek some other degree-1 vertex. We show that variants where we ... more >>>

The Fiat-Shamir heuristic transforms a public-coin interactive proof into a non-interactive argument, by replacing the verifier with a cryptographic hash function that is applied to the protocol’s transcript. Constructing hash functions for which this transformation is sound is a central and long-standing open question in cryptography.

We show that ... more >>>

In this paper, we prove a general hardness amplification scheme for optimization problems based on the technique of direct products.

We say that an optimization problem $\Pi$ is direct product feasible if it is possible to efficiently aggregate any $k$ instances of $\Pi$ and form one large instance ... more >>>

We identify several genres of search problems beyond NP for which existence of solutions is guaranteed. One class that seems especially rich in such problems is PEPP (for "polynomial empty pigeonhole principle"), which includes problems related to existence theorems proved through the union bound, such as finding a bit string ... more >>>

Recently it was shown that PLS is not contained in PPADS (ECCC report TR22-058). We show that this separation already implies that PLS is not contained in PPP. These separations are shown for the decision tree model of TFNP and imply similar separations in the type-2, relativized model.

Important note. ... more >>>

A problem is downward self-reducible if it can be solved efficiently given an oracle that returns
solutions for strictly smaller instances. In the decisional landscape, downward self-reducibility is
well studied and it is known that all downward self-reducible problems are in PSPACE. In this
paper, we initiate the study of ... more >>>

Connections between proof complexity and circuit complexity have become major tools for obtaining lower bounds in both areas. These connections -- which take the form of interpolation theorems and query-to-communication lifting theorems -- translate efficient proofs into small circuits, and vice versa, allowing tools from one area to be applied ... more >>>

Recent work has shown that many of the standard TFNP classes — such as PLS, PPADS, PPAD, SOPL, and EOPL — have corresponding proof systems in propositional proof complexity, in the sense that a total search problem is in the class if and only if the totality of the problem ... more >>>

We study the problem of finding a Tarski fixed point over the $k$-dimensional grid $[n]^k$. We give a black-box reduction from the Tarski problem to the same problem with an additional promise that the input function has a unique fixed point. It implies that the Tarski problem and the unique ... more >>>

The complexity class PPP contains all total search problems many-one reducible to the PIGEON problem, where we are given a succinct encoding of a function mapping n+1 pigeons to n holes, and must output two pigeons that collide in a hole. PPP is one of the “original five” syntactically-defined subclasses ... more >>>

We study the problem of finding multicollisions, that is, the total search problem in which the input is a function $\mathcal{C} : [A] \to [B]$ (represented as a circuit) and the goal is to find $L \leq \lceil A/B \rceil$ distinct elements $x_1,\ldots, x_L \in A$ such that $\mathcal{C}(x_1) = ... more >>>

We give an algorithm for finding an $\epsilon$-fixed point of a contraction map $f:[0,1]^k\rightarrow [0,1]^k$ under the $\ell_\infty$-norm with query complexity $O (k^2\log (1/\epsilon ) )$.

One of the most famous TFNP subclasses is PPP, which is the set of all search problems whose totality is guaranteed by the pigeonhole principle. The author's recent preprint [ECCC TR24-002 2024] has introduced a TFNP problem related to the pigeonhole principle over a quotient set, called Quotient Pigeon, and ... more >>>