# More Consequences of Falsifying SETH and the Orthogonal Vectors Conjecture

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.08554 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08554/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [The Fine-Grained Hardness of Sparse Linear Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03131/) (2021)
- [Fundamental Limitations on Subquadratic Alternatives to Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04271/) (2024)
- [Resource Constrained Pathfinding with A* and Negative Weights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11037/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis and the OV-conjecture are two popular hardness assumptions used to prove a plethora of lower bounds, especially in the realm of polynomial-time algorithms. The OV-conjecture in moderate dimension states there is no ε>0 for which an O(N2-ε)poly(D) time algorithm can decide whether there is a pair of orthogonal vectors in a given set of size N that contains D-dimensional binary vectors. We strengthen the evidence for these hardness assumptions. In particular, we show that if the OV-conjecture fails, then two problems for which we are far from obtaining even tiny improvements over exhaustive search would have surprisingly fast algorithms. If the OV conjecture is false, then there is a fixed ε>0 such that: (1) For all d and all large enough k, there is a randomized algorithm that takes O(n(1-ε)k) time to solve the Zero-Weight-k-Clique and Min-Weight-k-Clique problems on d-hypergraphs with n vertices. As a consequence, the OV-conjecture is implied by the Weighted Clique conjecture. (2) For all c, the satisfiability of sparse TC1 circuits on n inputs (that is, circuits with cn wires, depth clog n, and negation, AND, OR, and threshold gates) can be computed in time O((2-ε)n).