Necessary conditions for tractability of valued CSPs

The connection between constraint languages and clone theory has been a fruitful line of research on the complexity of constraint satisfaction problems. In a recent result, Cohen et al. [SICOMP’13] have characterised a Galois connection between valued constraint languages and so-called weighted clones. In this paper, we study the structure of weighted clones. We extend the results of Creed and Živný from [CP’11/SICOMP’13] and provide necessary conditions for tractability of weighted clones and thus valued constraint languages. We demonstrate that some of the necessary conditions are also sufficient for tractability, while others are provably not.