For a set $X$ of integer points, the relaxation complexity $\operatorname{rc}(X)$ is the smallest number of facets of any polyhedron $P$ such that $P \cap \mathbb{Z}^d = X$. In this paper, we focus on the case where $X$ is the discrete standard simplex $\Delta_d = \{\mathbf{0}, \mathbf{e}_1, \dots, \mathbf{e}_d\}$. We show that $\operatorname{rc}(\Delta_d) = O(\log d)$ by an explicit, elementary construction. This improves upon the previously best-known upper bound $\operatorname{rc}(\Delta_d) = O(d / \sqrt{\log d})$ due to Aprile, Averkov, Di Summa, and Hojny (2024) and matches an asymptotic lower bound by Averkov and Schymura (2022).

Let $f(n,k)$ be the minimum size of a collection of bicliques such that (i) every edge of the complete graph $K_n$ is covered by at least one and at most $k$ bicliques in the collection, and (ii) for each edge $\{u,v\}$, the number of bicliques in which $u$ appears in the first class and $v$ in the second class differs by at most one from the number of bicliques in which $u$ appears in the second class and $v$ in the first class. For $k=1$, $f(n,k)$ reduces to the biclique partition number of $K_n$, and the Graham-Pollak theorem gives $f(n,1)=n-1$. For $k=2$, $f(n,k)$ is the ordered biclique partition number of $K_n$, for which it is known that $c_1 n^{1/2} \le f(n,2) \le c_2 n^{1/2+o(1)}$ for some positive constants $c_1$ and $c_2$. In this note, we give almost tight bounds for $f(n,k)$ for fixed $k \ge 2$: \[ (1+o(1))c_1(k)\cdot n^{\frac{1}{\lceil k/2\rceil+1}} \le f(n,k) \le (1+o(1))c_2(k)\cdot n^{\frac{1}{\lfloor k/2\rfloor+1}+o(1)}, \] where $c_1(k)$ and $c_2(k)$ are positive constants.

Public-key cryptosystems eliminate the requirement for pre-shared secret keys by enabling encryption with a publicly disclosed key and decryption with a corresponding private key. In this article we generalize the public-key cryptosystems to ternary algebraic structures, with particular attention to ElGamal as a representative family. We introduce the necessary algebraic background for nonderived ternary structures, including special elements, ternary group rings, and a matrix ternarization procedure that maps binary rings and group rings to antidiagonal symbolic matrices closed under ternary multiplication. Building on these foundations, we formulate a ternary analogue of the ElGamal three-step protocol (key generation, ephemeral encryption, and decryption via querelements) and derive explicit ternary power and querelement formulas that enable correct decryption. Concrete instantiations and numerical examples over a ternary fraction field, a matrix-ternarized finite group ring, and a finite \((6,3)\)-ring (field) validate the construction and illustrate admissible word-length quantization and cycle behaviour of ternary powers. The ternary framework highlights two practical advantages: richer algebraic structure (querelements replace binary inverses) that increases algebraic complexity for attackers, and higher information density (matrix ternarization transfers paired/plaintext vectors). Formal hardness assumptions, optimized parameter choices, and comprehensive security and performance analyses remain necessary future work.

We study fundamental limitations of the generic Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on constrained problems where valid solutions form a low dimensional manifold inside the Boolean hypercube, and we present a provable route to exponential improvements via constraint embedding. Focusing on permutation constrained objectives, we show that the standard generic QAOA ansatz, with a transverse field mixer and diagonal r local cost, faces an intrinsic feasibility bottleneck: even after angle optimization, circuits whose depth grows at most sublinearly with n cannot raise the total probability mass on the feasible manifold much above the uniform baseline suppressed by the size of the full Hilber space. Against this envelope we introduce a minimal constraint enhanced kernel (CE QAOA) that operates directly inside a product one hot subspace and mixes with a block local XY Hamiltonian. For permutation constrained problems, we prove an angle robust, depth matched exponential enhancement where the ratio between the feasible mass from CE QAOA and generic QAOA grows exponentially in $n^2$ for all depths up to a linear fraction of n, under a mild polynomial growth condition on the interaction hypergraph. Thanks to the problem algorithm co design in the kernel construction, the techniques and guarantees extend beyond permutations to a broad class of NP-Hard constrained optimization problems.

The Spanning Tree Congestion (STC) problem is the following NP-hard problem: given a graph $G$, construct a spanning tree $T$ of $G$ minimizing its maximum edge congestion where the congestion of an edge $e\in T$ is the number of edges $uv$ in $G$ such that the unique path between $u$ and $v$ in $T$ passes through $e$; the optimal value for a given graph $G$ is denoted $STC(G)$. It is known that every spanning tree is an $n/2$-approximation for the STP problem. A long-standing problem is to design a better approximation algorithm. Our contribution towards this goal is an $O(Δ\cdot\log^{3/2}n)$-approximation algorithm where $Δ$ is the maximum degree in $G$ and $n$ the number of vertices. For graphs with a maximum degree bounded by a polylog of the number of vertices, this is an exponential improvement over the previous best approximation. Our main tool for the algorithm is a new lower bound on the spanning tree congestion which is of independent interest. Denoting by $hb(G)$ the hereditary bisection of $G$ which is the maximum bisection width over all subgraphs of $G$, we prove that for every graph $G$, $STC(G)\geq Ω(hb(G)/Δ)$.

A long-standing conjecture of Caro (Discrete Math, 1994), confirmed by Ferber and Krivelevich (Adv Math, 2022), states that every $n$-vertex graph $G$ without isolated vertices contains an induced subgraph of order linear in $n$ in which every vertex has odd degree. We generalize this result to graphs $G$ whose vertices are labeled by $\ell: V(G)\to \{0,1\}$. We require, in an induced subgraph, all $0$-labeled vertices to have even degree and all $1$-labeled vertices to have odd degree. Let $h_{\ell}(G)$ denote the maximum order of such a subgraph. Let $f_{oe}(G)=\min_{\ell} h_{\ell}(G)$ be the worst-labeling parameter. We establish a pointwise lower bound for $h_{\ell}(G)$ that immediately yields a linear lower bound in $|V(G)|$ for $f_{oe}(G)$, where $G$ has no isolated vertices. For an $n$-vertex connected graph, we obtain a sharp lower bound for $f_{oe}(G)$: $f_{oe}(G)\ge \lceil (n-1)/{\chi}_{mm}{(G)} \rceil,$ where ${\chi}_{mm}{(G)}$ is the maximum chromatic number of a minor of $G.$ Using proved cases of Hadwiger's Conjecture, we show that for $t\in \{3,4,5,6\}$, if an $n$-vertex connected graph $G$ is $K_t$-minor-free, then $f_{oe}(G)\ge \lceil (n-1)/(t-1)\rceil$ and this bound is sharp for each $t\in \{3,4,5,6\}$. Finally, we conjecture that $f_{oe}(G)\ge f_o(G)/2$ for all graphs $G$ and confirm the conjecture for all trees and complete multipartite graphs.

We consider the multilinear polytope, defined as the convex hull of the feasible region of a lifted binary polynomial optimization problem. We define a relaxation in an extended space for this polytope, which we call the complete edge relaxation. The complete edge relaxation is stronger than several well-known relaxations of the multilinear polytope, including the standard linearization, the flower relaxation, and the intersection of all possible recursive McCormick relaxations. In addition, for fixed-degree binary polynomial optimization problems, the case of primary practical interest, the complete edge relaxation is of polynomial size and is computationally efficient in practice. We prove that the complete edge relaxation is an extension of the multilinear polytope if and only if the corresponding hypergraph is alpha-acyclic, the most general type of hypergraph acyclicity. This is in stark contrast with the widely-used standard linearization, which describes the multilinear polytope if and only if the hypergraph is Berge-acyclic, the most restrictive type of hypergraph acyclicity. Finally, we introduce a new class of facet-defining inequalities for the multilinear polytope of alpha-cycles of length three, which serve as the generalization of the well-known triangle inequalities for the Boolean quadric polytope.

Building on the techniques behind the recent progress on the 3-term arithmetic progression problem \cite{KelleyM2023strong}, Kelley, Lovett, and Meka \cite{KelleyLM2024-nof} constructed the first explicit 3-player function $f:[N]^3 \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ that demonstrates a strong separation between randomized and (non-)deterministic NOF communication complexity. Specifically, their hard function can be solved by a randomized protocol sending $O(1)$ bits, but requires $\Omega(\log^{1/3}(N))$ bits of communication with a deterministic (or non-deterministic) protocol. We show a stronger $\Omega(\log^{1/2}(N))$ lower bound for their construction. To achieve this, the key technical advancement is an improvement to the sifting argument for grid norms of (somewhat dense) bipartite graphs. In addition to quantitative improvement, we qualitatively improve over \cite{KelleyLM2024-nof} by relaxing the hardness condition: while \cite{KelleyLM2024-nof} proved their lower bound for any function $f$ that satisfies a strong two-sided pseudorandom condition, we show that a weak one-sided condition suffices. This is achieved by a new structural result for cylinder intersections (or, in graph-theoretic language, the set of triangles induced from a tripartite graph), showing that any small cylinder intersection can be efficiently covered by a sum of simple ``slice'' functions.

We introduce two models of consensus following a majority rule on time-evolving stochastic block models (SBM), in which the network evolution is Markovian or non-Markovian. Under the majority rule, in each round, each agent simultaneously updates their opinion according to the majority of their neighbors. Our network has a community structure and randomly evolves with time. In contrast to the classic setting, the dynamics is not purely deterministic, and reflects the structure of SBM by resampling the connections at each step, making agents with the same opinion more likely to connect than those with different opinions. In the Markovian model, connections between agents are resampled at each step according to the SBM law and each agent updates their opinion via the majority rule. We prove a power-of-one type result, i.e., any initial bias leads to a non-trivial advantage of winning in the end, uniformly in the size of the network. In the non-Markovian model, a connection between two agents is resampled according to the SBM law only when at least one of them changes opinion and is otherwise kept the same. We identify the phase-transition threshold, up to the second-order leading term, between halting and fast convergence to consensus. We also give sufficient initial-lead conditions for consensus to occur within one, two, or three rounds.