Abstract:
We study the computational complexity of two hard problems on determinantal point processes (DPPs). One is maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference, i.e., to find a principal submatrix having the maximum determinant. The other is probabilistic inference on exponentiated DPPs (E-DPPs), which can sharpen or weaken the diversity preference of DPPs with an exponent parameter p. We prove the following complexity-theoretic hardness results that explain the difficulty in approximating unconstrained MAP inference and the normalizing constant for E-DPPs. (1) Unconstrained MAP inference for an n \times n matrix is NP-hard to approximate within a 2^{\beta n}-factor, where \beta = 10^{-10^{13}}. This result improves upon a (9/8-\epsilon)-factor inapproximability given by Kulesza and Taskar (2012). (2) The normalizing constant for E-DPPs of any (fixed) constant exponent p \geq \beta^{-1} = 10^{10^{13}} is NP-hard to approximate within a 2^{\beta pn}-factor. This gives a(nother) negative answer to open questions posed by Kulesza and Taskar (2012); Ohsaka and Matsuoka (2020).