Strong algebraic proof systems such as IPS (Ideal Proof System; Grochow-Pitassi JACM 2018) offer a general model for
deriving polynomials in an ideal and refuting unsatisfiable propositional formulas, subsuming most standard propositional proof systems. A major approach for lower bounding the size of IPS refutations is the Functional Lower Bound ... more >>>

In this paper we prove the following two results.
* We show that for any $C \in {mVF, mVP, mVNP}$, $C = \overline{C}$. Here, $mVF, mVP$, and $mVNP$ are monotone variants of $VF, VP$, and $VNP$, respectively. For an algebraic complexity class $C$, $\overline{C}$ denotes the closure of $C$. ... more >>>

Proving explicit lower bounds on the size of algebraic formulas is a long-standing open problem in the area of algebraic complexity theory. Recent results in the area (e.g. a lower bound against constant-depth algebraic formulas due to Limaye, Srinivasan, and Tavenas (FOCS 2021)) have indicated a way forward for attacking ... more >>>

Classical results of Brent, Kuck and Maruyama (IEEE Trans. Computers 1973) and Brent (JACM 1974) show that any algebraic formula of size s can be converted to one of depth O(log s) with only a polynomial blow-up in size. In this paper, we consider a fine-grained version of this result ... more >>>

A polynomial $P\in F[x_1,\ldots,x_n]$ is said to be symmetric if it is invariant under any permutation of its input variables. The study of symmetric polynomials is a classical topic in mathematics, specifically in algebraic combinatorics and representation theory. More recently, they have been studied in several works in computer science, ... more >>>

We make progress on understanding a lower bound technique that was recently used by the authors to prove the first superpolynomial constant-depth circuit lower bounds against algebraic circuits.

More specifically, our previous work applied the well-known partial derivative method in a new setting, that of 'lopsided' set-multilinear polynomials. A ... more >>>

An Algebraic Formula for a polynomial $P\in F[x_1,\ldots,x_N]$ is an algebraic expression for $P(x_1,\ldots,x_N)$ using variables, field constants, additions and multiplications. Such formulas capture an algebraic analog of the Boolean complexity class $\mathrm{NC}^1.$ Proving lower bounds against this model is thus an important problem.

It is known that, to prove ... more >>>

An Algebraic Circuit for a polynomial $P\in F[x_1,\ldots,x_N]$ is a computational model for constructing the polynomial $P$ using only additions and multiplications. It is a \emph{syntactic} model of computation, as opposed to the Boolean Circuit model, and hence lower bounds for this model are widely expected to be easier to ... more >>>

The determinant is a canonical VBP-complete polynomial in the algebraic complexity setting. In this work, we introduce two variants of the determinant polynomial which we call $StackDet_n(X)$ and $CountDet_n(X)$ and show that they are VP and VNP complete respectively under $p$-projections. The definitions of the polynomials are inspired by a ... more >>>

Schur Polynomials are families of symmetric polynomials that have been
classically studied in Combinatorics and Algebra alike. They play a central
role in the study of Symmetric functions, in Representation theory [Sta99], in
Schubert calculus [LM10] as well as in Enumerative combinatorics [Gas96, Sta84,
Sta99]. In recent years, they have ... more >>>

In this paper we prove two results about $AC^0[\oplus]$ circuits.

We show that for $d(N) = o(\sqrt{\log N/\log \log N})$ and $N \leq s(N) \leq 2^{dN^{1/d^2}}$ there is an explicit family of functions $\{f_N:\{0,1\}^N\rightarrow \{0,1\}\}$ such that
$f_N$ has uniform $AC^0$ formulas of depth $d$ and size at ... more >>>

We show that there is a randomized algorithm that, when given a small constant-depth Boolean circuit $C$ made up of gates that compute constant-degree Polynomial Threshold functions or PTFs (i.e., Boolean functions that compute signs of constant-degree polynomials), counts the number of satisfying assignments to $C$ in significantly better than ... more >>>

The $\delta$-Coin Problem is the computational problem of distinguishing between coins that are heads with probability $(1+\delta)/2$ or $(1-\delta)/2,$ where $\delta$ is a parameter that is going to $0$. We study the complexity of this problem in the model of constant-depth Boolean circuits and prove the following results.

1. Upper ... more >>>

We present polynomial families complete for the well-studied algebraic complexity classes VF, VBP, VP, and VNP. The polynomial families are based on the homomorphism polynomials studied in the recent works of Durand et al. (2014) and Mahajan et al. (2016). We consider three different variants of graph homomorphisms, namely injective ... more >>>

We study the size blow-up that is necessary to convert an algebraic circuit of product-depth $\Delta+1$ to one of product-depth $\Delta$ in the multilinear setting.

We show that for every positive $\Delta = \Delta(n) = o(\log n/\log \log n),$ there is an explicit multilinear polynomial $P^{(\Delta)}$ on $n$ variables that ... more >>>

The complexity of Iterated Matrix Multiplication is a central theme in Computational Complexity theory, as the problem is closely related to the problem of separating various complexity classes within $\mathrm{P}$. In this paper, we study the algebraic formula complexity of multiplying $d$ many $2\times 2$ matrices, denoted $\mathrm{IMM}_{d}$, and show ... more >>>

We investigate the power of Non-commutative Arithmetic Circuits, which compute polynomials over the free non-commutative polynomial ring $\mathbb{F}\langle x_1,\dots,x_N \rangle$, where variables do not commute. We consider circuits that are restricted in the ways in which they can compute monomials: this can be seen as restricting the families of parse ... more >>>

In this work we consider the term evaluation problem which involves, given a term over some algebra and a valid input to the term, computing the value of the term on that input. This is a classical problem studied under many names such as formula evaluation problem, formula value problem ... more >>>

In this work we study the problem of efficiently isolating witnesses for the complexity classes NL and LogCFL, which are two well-studied complexity classes contained in P. We prove that if there is a L/poly randomized procedure with success probability at least 2/3 for isolating an s-t path in a ... more >>>

In this note, we prove that there is an explicit polynomial in VP such that any $\Sigma\Pi\Sigma$ arithmetic circuit computing it must have size at least $n^{3-o(1)}$. Up to $n^{o(1)}$ factors, this strengthens a recent result of Kayal, Saha and Tavenas (ICALP 2016) which gives a polynomial in VNP with ... more >>>

We continue the study of the shifted partial derivative measure, introduced by Kayal (ECCC 2012), which has been used to prove many strong depth-4 circuit lower bounds starting from the work of Kayal, and that of Gupta et al. (CCC 2013).

We show a strong lower bound on the dimension ... more >>>

Nisan (STOC 1991) exhibited a polynomial which is computable by linear sized non-commutative circuits but requires exponential sized non-commutative algebraic branching programs. Nisan's hard polynomial is in fact computable by linear sized skew circuits (skew circuits are circuits where every multiplication gate has the property that all but one of ... more >>>

A celebrated result of Barrington (1985) proved that polynomial size, width-5 branching programs (BP) are equivalent in power to a restricted form of branching programs -- polynomial sized width-5 permutation branching programs (PBP), which in turn capture all of NC1. On the other hand it is known that width-3 PBPs ... more >>>

SUBSET SUM is a well known NP-complete problem:
given $t \in Z^{+}$ and a set $S$ of $m$ positive integers, output YES if and only if there is a subset $S^\prime \subseteq S$ such that the sum of all numbers in $S^\prime$ equals $t$. The problem and its search ... more >>>

We show here a $2^{\Omega(\sqrt{d} \cdot \log N)}$ size lower bound for homogeneous depth four arithmetic formulas. That is, we give
an explicit family of polynomials of degree $d$ on $N$ variables (with $N = d^3$ in our case) with $0, 1$-coefficients such that
for any representation of ... more >>>

A proof system for a language $L$ is a function $f$ such that Range$(f)$ is exactly $L$. In this paper, we look at proofsystems from a circuit complexity point of view and study proof systems that are computationally very restricted. The restriction we study is: they can be computed by ... more >>>

We study the arithmetic complexity of iterated matrix multiplication. We show that any multilinear homogeneous depth $4$ arithmetic formula computing the product of $d$ generic matrices of size $n \times n$, IMM$_{n,d}$, has size $n^{\Omega(\sqrt{d})}$ as long as $d \leq n^{1/10}$. This improves the result of Nisan and Wigderson (Computational ... more >>>

We define DLOGTIME proof systems, DLTPS, which generalize NC0 proof systems.
It is known that functions such as Exact-k and Majority do not have NC0 proof systems. Here, we give a DLTPS for Exact-k (and therefore for Majority) and also for other natural functions such as Reach and k-Clique. Though ... more >>>

We give a \#NC$^1$ upper bound for the problem of counting accepting paths in any fixed visibly pushdown automaton. Our algorithm involves a non-trivial adaptation of the arithmetic formula evaluation algorithm of Buss, Cook, Gupta, Ramachandran (BCGR: SICOMP 21(4), 1992). We also show that the problem is \#NC$^1$ hard. Our ... more >>>

In this paper, we give streaming algorithms for some problems which are known to be in deterministic log-space, when the number of passes made on the input is unbounded. If the input data is massive,
the conventional deterministic log-space algorithms may not run efficiently. We study the complexity of the ... more >>>

Graph Isomorphism is the prime example of a computational problem with a wide difference between the best known lower and upper bounds on its complexity. There is a significant gap between extant lower and upper bounds for planar graphs as well. We bridge the gap for this natural and ... more >>>

The parallel complexity class NC^1 has many equivalent models such as
polynomial size formulae and bounded width branching
programs. Caussinus et al. \cite{CMTV} considered arithmetizations of
two of these classes, #NC^1 and #BWBP. We further this study to
include arithmetization of other classes. In particular, we show that
counting paths ... more >>>

We re-examine the complexity of evaluating monotone planar circuits
MPCVP, with special attention to circuits with cylindrical
embeddings. MPCVP is known to be in NC^3, and for the special
case of upward stratified circuits, it is known to be in
LogDCFL. We characterize cylindricality, which ... more >>>