Under the auspices of the Computational Complexity Foundation (CCF)

REPORTS > KEYWORD > NATURAL PROOFS:
Reports tagged with natural proofs:
TR08-038 | 4th April 2008
Eric Allender, Michal Koucky

#### Amplifying Lower Bounds by Means of Self-Reducibility

Revisions: 2

We observe that many important computational problems in NC^1 share a simple self-reducibility property. We then show that, for any problem A having this self-reducibility property, A has polynomial size TC^0 circuits if and only if it has TC^0 circuits of size n^{1+\epsilon} for every \epsilon > 0 (counting the ... more >>>

TR11-076 | 7th May 2011
Eric Miles, Emanuele Viola

#### The Advanced Encryption Standard, Candidate Pseudorandom Functions, and Natural Proofs

Revisions: 1

We put forth several simple candidate pseudorandom functions f_k : {0,1}^n -> {0,1} with security (a.k.a. hardness) 2^n that are inspired by the AES block-cipher by Daemen and Rijmen (2000). The functions are computable more efficiently, and use a shorter key (a.k.a. seed) than previous
constructions. In particular, we ... more >>>

TR16-008 | 26th January 2016
Marco Carmosino, Russell Impagliazzo, Valentine Kabanets, Antonina Kolokolova

#### Algorithms from Natural Lower Bounds

Circuit analysis algorithms such as learning, SAT, minimum circuit size, and compression imply circuit lower bounds. We show a generic implication in the opposite direction: natural properties (in the sense of Razborov and Rudich) imply randomized learning and compression algorithms. This is the first such implication outside of the derandomization ... more >>>

TR17-009 | 19th January 2017
Joshua Grochow, Mrinal Kumar, Michael Saks, Shubhangi Saraf

#### Towards an algebraic natural proofs barrier via polynomial identity testing

We observe that a certain kind of algebraic proof - which covers essentially all known algebraic circuit lower bounds to date - cannot be used to prove lower bounds against VP if and only if what we call succinct hitting sets exist for VP. This is analogous to the Razborov-Rudich ... more >>>

TR17-091 | 17th May 2017
Andrej Bogdanov

#### Small bias requires large formulas

Revisions: 1

A small-biased function is a randomized function whose distribution of truth-tables is small-biased. We demonstrate that known explicit lower bounds on the size of (1) general Boolean formulas, (2) Boolean formulas of fan-in two, (3) de Morgan formulas, as well as (4) correlation lower bounds against small de Morgan formulas ... more >>>

TR17-144 | 27th September 2017
Moritz Müller, Ján Pich

#### Feasibly constructive proofs of succinct weak circuit lower bounds

Revisions: 1

We ask for feasibly constructive proofs of known circuit lower bounds for explicit functions on bit strings of length $n$. In 1995 Razborov showed that many can be proved in Cook’s theory $PV_1$, a bounded arithmetic formalizing polynomial time reasoning. He formalized circuit lower bound statements for small $n$ of ... more >>>

TR19-155 | 6th November 2019
Rahul Santhanam

#### Pseudorandomness and the Minimum Circuit Size Problem

We explore the possibility of basing one-way functions on the average-case hardness of the fundamental Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP[$s$]), which asks whether a Boolean function on $n$ bits specified by its truth table has circuits of size $s(n)$.

1. (Pseudorandomness from Zero-Error Average-Case Hardness) We show that for ... more >>>

TR19-168 | 20th November 2019
Igor Carboni Oliveira, Lijie Chen, Shuichi Hirahara, Ján Pich, Ninad Rajgopal, Rahul Santhanam

#### Beyond Natural Proofs: Hardness Magnification and Locality

Hardness magnification reduces major complexity separations (such as $EXP \not\subseteq NC^1$) to proving lower bounds for some natural problem $Q$ against weak circuit models. Several recent works [OS18, MMW19, CT19, OPS19, CMMW19, Oli19, CJW19a] have established results of this form. In the most intriguing cases, the required lower bound is ... more >>>

TR20-085 | 5th June 2020

#### Neural Networks with Small Weights and Depth-Separation Barriers

In studying the expressiveness of neural networks, an important question is whether there are functions which can only be approximated by sufficiently deep networks, assuming their size is bounded. However, for constant depths, existing results are limited to depths $2$ and $3$, and achieving results for higher depths has been ... more >>>

TR20-183 | 6th December 2020
Rahul Ilango

#### Constant Depth Formula and Partial Function Versions of MCSP are Hard

Attempts to prove the intractability of the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) date as far back as the 1950s and are well-motivated by connections to cryptography, learning theory, and average-case complexity. In this work, we make progress, on two fronts, towards showing MCSP is intractable under worst-case assumptions.

While ... more >>>

TR21-125 | 23rd August 2021
Zhiyuan Fan, Jiatu Li, Tianqi Yang

#### The Exact Complexity of Pseudorandom Functions and Tight Barriers to Lower Bound Proofs

How much computational resource do we need for cryptography? This is an important question of both theoretical and practical interests. In this paper, we study the problem on pseudorandom functions (PRFs) in the context of circuit complexity. Perhaps surprisingly, we prove extremely tight upper and lower bounds in various circuit ... more >>>

ISSN 1433-8092 | Imprint