A new coding-based algorithm for finding closest pair of vectors

Given n vectors x0,x1,…,xn−1 in {0,1}m, how to find two vectors whose pairwise Hamming distance is minimum? This problem is known as the Closest Pair Problem. If these vectors are generated uniformly at random except two of them are correlated with Pearson-correlation coefficient ρ, then the problem is called the Light Bulb Problem. In this work, we propose a novel coding-based scheme for the Closest Pair Problem. We design both randomized and deterministic algorithms, which achieve the best-known running time when the length of input vectors m is small and the minimum distance is very small compared to m. Specifically, the running time of our randomized algorithm is O(nlog2⁡n⋅2cm⋅poly(m)) and the running time of our deterministic algorithm is O(nlog⁡n⋅2c′m⋅poly(m)), where c and c′ are constants depending only on the (relative) distance of the closest pair. When applied to the Light Bulb Problem, our result yields state-of-the-art deterministic running time when the Pearson-correlation coefficient ρ is very large. Specifically, when ρ≥0.9933, our deterministic algorithm runs faster than the previously best deterministic algorithm (Alman, SOSA 2019).