Code Sparsification and its Applications

We introduce a notion of code sparsification that generalizes the notion of cut sparsification in graphs. For a (linear) code $\mathcal{C} \subseteq \mathbb{F}q^n$ of dimension $k$ a $(1 \pm \epsilon)$-sparsification of size $s$ is given by a weighted set $S \subseteq [n]$ with $|S| \leq s$ such that for every codeword $c \in \mathcal{C}$ the projection $c|S$ of $c$ to the set $S$ has (weighted) hamming weight which is a $(1 \pm \epsilon)$ approximation of the hamming weight of $c$. We show that for every code there exists a $(1 \pm \epsilon)$-sparsification of size $s = \widetilde{O}(k \log (q) / \epsilon^2)$. This immediately implies known results on graph and hypergraph cut sparsification up to polylogarithmic factors (with a simple unified proof). One application of our result is near-linear size sparsifiers for constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) over $\mathbb{F}p$-valued variables whose unsatisfying assignments can be expressed as the zeros of a linear equation modulo a prime $p$. Building on this, we obtain a complete characterization of ternary Boolean CSPs that admit near-linear size sparsification. Finally, by connections between the eigenvalues of the Laplacians of Cayley graphs over $\mathbb{F}2^k$ to the weights of codewords, we also give the first proof of the existence of spectral Cayley graph sparsifiers over $\mathbb{F}_2^k$ by Cayley graphs, i.e., where we sparsify the set of generators to nearly-optimal size.