Sketching, Streaming, and Fine-Grained Complexity of (Weighted) LCS

We study sketching and streaming algorithms for the Longest Common Subsequence problem (LCS) on strings of small alphabet size $|\Sigma|$. For the problem of deciding whether the LCS of strings $x,y$ has length at least $L$, we obtain a sketch size and streaming space usage of $\mathcal{O}(L^{|\Sigma| - 1} \log L)$. We also prove matching unconditional lower bounds. As an application, we study a variant of LCS where each alphabet symbol is equipped with a weight that is given as input, and the task is to compute a common subsequence of maximum total weight. Using our sketching algorithm, we obtain an $\mathcal{O}(\textrm{min}{nm, n + m^{{\lvert \Sigma \rvert}}})$-time algorithm for this problem, on strings $x,y$ of length $n,m$, with $n \ge m$. We prove optimality of this running time up to lower order factors, assuming the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis.