We study the black-box function inversion problem, which is the problem of finding $x \in [N]$ such that $f(x) = y$, given as input some challenge point $y$ in the image of a function $f : [N] \to [N]$, using $T$ oracle queries to $f$ and preprocessed advice $\sigma \in ... more >>>

We study a natural and quite general model of branch-and-bound algorithms. In this model, an algorithm attempts to minimize (or maximize) a function $f : D \to \mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}$ by making oracle queries to a heuristic $h_f$ satisfying
\[
\min_{x \in S} f(x) \leq h_f(S) \leq \gamma \cdot ... more >>>

We revisit the fundamental problem of determining seed length lower bounds for strong extractors and natural variants thereof. These variants stem from a ``change in quantifiers'' over the seeds of the extractor: While a strong extractor requires that the average output bias (over all seeds) is small for all input ... more >>>

We show that assuming the strong exponential-time hypothesis (SETH), there are no non-trivial algorithms for the nearest codeword problem (NCP), the minimum distance problem (MDP), or the nearest codeword problem with preprocessing (NCPP) on linear codes over any finite field. More precisely, we show that there are no NCP, MDP, ... more >>>