Exact recovery of Planted Cliques in Semi-random graphs

Abstract: In this paper, we study the Planted Clique problem in a semi-random model. Our model is inspired from the Feige-Kilian model [FK01] which has been studied in many other works [FK00, Ste17, MMT20] for a variety of graph problems. Our algorithm and analysis is on similar lines to the one studied for the Densest $k$-subgraph problem in the recent work of Khanna and Louis [KL20]. However since our algorithm fully recovers the planted clique w.h.p. (for a "large" range of input parameters), we require some new ideas. As a by-product of our main result, we give an alternate SDP based rounding algorithm (with matching guarantees) for solving the Planted Clique problem in a random graph. Also, we are able to solve special cases of the models introduced for the Densest $k$-subgraph problem in [KL20], when the planted subgraph is a clique instead of an arbitrary $d$-regular graph.