Paper detail

Reducing uniformity in Khot-Saket hypergraph coloring hardness reductions

In a recent result, Khot and Saket [FOCS 2014] proved the quasi-NP-hardness of coloring a 2-colorable 12-uniform hypergraph with $2^{(\log n)^{Ω(1)}}$ colors. This result was proved using a novel outer PCP verifier which had a strong soundness guarantee. In this note, we show that we can reduce the arity of their result by modifying their 12-query inner verifier to an 8-query inner verifier based on the hypergraph coloring hardness reductions of Guruswami et. al. [STOC 2014]. More precisely, we prove quasi-NP-hardness of the following problems on n-vertex hypergraphs. - Coloring a 2-colorable 8-uniform hypergraph with $2^{(\log n)^{Ω(1)}}$ colors. - Coloring a 4-colorable 4-uniform hypergraph with $2^{(\log n)^{Ω(1)}}$ colors.