We introduce and study a new model of decision trees that lies at the frontier of provable circuit lower bounds.
We study $\ell$-local decision trees, in which each internal node queries an $\ell$-local function of the input. We show that sufficiently strong lower bounds for $\ell$-local decision trees would imply ... more >>>
We prove that, for every constant $\varepsilon>0$ and every function $f:\Sigma^n\to\{0, 1\}$, there is a coalition of $O(n/\sqrt{\log n})$ coordinates and a target output $b\in\{0, 1\}$ such that, after the remaining coordinates are sampled uniformly and independently, the coalition can choose its values to make the output equal to $b$ ... more >>>
We study the problem of constructing randomness extractors for samplable sources, introduced by Trevisan and Vadhan (FOCS 2000), a natural computational model of imperfect randomness, where the source $\mathbb{X}$ (on $n$ bits) is generated by a polynomial-size circuit. They showed how to extract from sources with min-entropy $(1-\alpha)n$ (for small ... more >>>
We investigate the task of deterministically condensing randomness from Online Non-Oblivious Symbol Fixing (oNOSF) sources, a natural model of defective random sources for which it is known that extraction is impossible [AORSV, EUROCRYPT'20]. A $(g,\ell)$-oNOSF source is a sequence of $\ell$ blocks $\mathbf{X} = (\mathbf{X}_1, \dots, \mathbf{X}_{\ell})\sim (\{0, 1\}^{n})^{\ell}$, where ... more >>>
We present the first explicit construction of two-sided lossless expanders in the unbalanced setting (bipartite graphs that have many more nodes on the left than on the right). Prior to our work, all known explicit constructions in the unbalanced setting achieved only one-sided lossless expansion.
Specifically, we show ... more >>>
While the existence of randomness extractors, both seeded and seedless, has been thoroughly studied for many sources of randomness, currently, very little is known regarding the existence of seedless condensers in many settings. Here, we prove several new results for seedless condensers in the context of three related classes of ... more >>>
We explicitly construct the first nontrivial extractors for degree $d \ge 2$ polynomial sources over $\mathbb{F}_2^n$. Our extractor requires min-entropy $k\geq n - \frac{\sqrt{\log n}}{(d\log \log n)^{d/2}}$. Previously, no constructions were known, even for min-entropy $k\geq n-1$. A key ingredient in our construction is an input reduction lemma, which allows ... more >>>