The Existential Theory of the Reals with Summation Operators
<|reference_start|>The Existential Theory of the Reals with Summation Operators: To characterize the computational complexity of satisfiability problems for probabilistic and causal reasoning within the Pearl's Causal Hierarchy, arXiv:2305.09508 [cs.AI] introduce a new natural class, named succ-$\exists$R. This class can be viewed as a succinct variant of the well-studied class $\exists$R based on the Existential Theory of the Reals (ETR). Analogously to $\exists$R, succ-$\exists$R is an intermediate class between NEXP and EXPSPACE, the exponential versions of NP and PSPACE. The main contributions of this work are threefold. Firstly, we characterize the class succ-$\exists$R in terms of nondeterministic real RAM machines and develop structural complexity theoretic results for real RAMs, including translation and hierarchy theorems. Notably, we demonstrate the separation of $\exists$R and succ-$\exists$R. Secondly, we examine the complexity of model checking and satisfiability of fragments of existential second-order logic and probabilistic independence logic. We show succ-$\exists$R- completeness of several of these problems, for which the best-known complexity lower and upper bounds were previously NEXP-hardness and EXPSPACE, respectively. Thirdly, while succ-$\exists$R is characterized in terms of ordinary (non-succinct) ETR instances enriched by exponential sums and a mechanism to index exponentially many variables, in this paper, we prove that when only exponential sums are added, the corresponding class $\exists$R^{\Sigma} is contained in PSPACE. We conjecture that this inclusion is strict, as this class is equivalent to adding a VNP-oracle to a polynomial time nondeterministic real RAM. Conversely, the addition of exponential products to ETR, yields PSPACE. Additionally, we study the satisfiability problem for probabilistic reasoning, with the additional requirement of a small model and prove that this problem is complete for $\exists$R^{\Sigma}.<|reference_end|>
@article{bläser2024the,
    title={The Existential Theory of the Reals with Summation Operators},
    author={Markus Bl"aser, Julian D"orfler, Maciej Liskiewicz, Benito van der
  Zander},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.04697},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2405.04697},
    primaryClass={cs.CC cs.LO}
}