Let $X$ be randomly chosen from $\{-1,1\}^n$, and let $Y$ be randomly
chosen from the standard spherical Gaussian on $\R^n$. For any (possibly unbounded) polytope $P$
formed by the intersection of $k$ halfspaces, we prove that
$$\left|\Pr\left[X \in P\right] - \Pr\left[Y \in P\right]\right| \leq \log^{8/5}k ... more >>>

In this paper we prove results regarding Boolean functions with small spectral norm (the spectral norm of $f$ is $\|\hat{f}\|_1=\sum_{\alpha}|\hat{f}(\alpha)|$). Specifically, we prove the following results for functions $f:\{0,1\}^n\to \{0,1\}$ with $\|\hat{f}\|_1=A$.

1. There is a subspace $V$ of co-dimension at most $A^2$ such that $f|_V$ is constant.

2. ... more >>>

We give the first representation-independent hardness result for agnostically learning halfspaces with respect to the Gaussian distribution. We reduce from the problem of learning sparse parities with noise with respect to the uniform distribution on the hypercube (sparse LPN), a notoriously hard problem in computer science and show that ... more >>>

Finding a proper coloring of a $t$-colorable graph $G$ with $t$ colors is a classic NP-hard problem when $t\ge 3$. In this work, we investigate the approximate coloring problem in which the objective is to find a proper $c$-coloring of $G$ where $c \ge t$. We show that for all ... more >>>

A classic result due to Schaefer (1978) classifies all constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) over the Boolean domain as being either in $\mathsf{P}$ or NP-hard. This paper considers a promise-problem variant of CSPs called PCSPs. A PCSP over a finite set of pairs of constraints $\Gamma$ consists of a pair $(\Psi_P, ... more >>>

Nisan and Szegedy showed that low degree Boolean functions are juntas. Kindler and Safra showed that low degree functions which are *almost* Boolean are close to juntas. Their result holds with respect to $\mu_p$ for every *constant* $p$. When $p$ is allowed to be very small, new phenomena emerge. ... more >>>

We initiate the study of Boolean function analysis on high-dimensional expanders. We describe an analog of the Fourier expansion and of the Fourier levels on simplicial complexes, and generalize the FKN theorem to high-dimensional expanders.

Our results demonstrate that a high-dimensional expanding complex X can sometimes serve as a sparse ... more >>>

Given a Boolean function $f: \{-1,1\}^n\rightarrow \{-1,1\}$, define the Fourier distribution to be the distribution on subsets of $[n]$, where each $S\subseteq [n]$ is sampled with probability $\widehat{f}(S)^2$. The Fourier Entropy-Influence (FEI) conjecture of Friedgut and Kalai [FK96] seeks to relate two fundamental measures associated with the Fourier distribution: does ... more >>>

We construct a simple and total XOR function $F$ on $2n$ variables that has only $O(\sqrt{n})$ spectral norm, $O(n^2)$ approximate rank and $n^{O(\log n)}$ approximate nonnegative rank. We show it has polynomially large randomized bounded-error communication complexity of $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$. This yields the first exponential gap between the logarithm of the ... more >>>

The seminal result of Kahn, Kalai and Linial shows that a coalition of $O(\frac{n}{\log n})$ players can bias the outcome of *any* Boolean function $\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ with respect to the uniform measure. We extend their result to arbitrary product measures on $\{0,1\}^n$, by combining their argument with a completely ... more >>>

Hypercontractivity is one of the most powerful tools in Boolean function analysis. Originally studied over the discrete hypercube, recent years have seen increasing interest in extensions to settings like the $p$-biased cube, slice, or Grassmannian, where variants of hypercontractivity have found a number of breakthrough applications including the resolution of ... more >>>

We prove a stability result for general $3$-wise correlations over distributions satisfying mild connectivity properties. More concretely, we show that if $\Sigma,\Gamma$ and $\Phi$ are alphabets of constant size, and $\mu$ is a pairwise connected distribution over $\Sigma\times\Gamma\times\Phi$ with no $(\mathbb{Z},+)$ embeddings in which the probability of each atom is ... more >>>

For a prime $p$, a restricted arithmetic progression in $\mathbb{F}_p^n$ is a triplet of vectors $x, x+a, x+2a$ in which the common difference $a$ is a non-zero element from $\{0,1,2\}^n$. What is the size of the largest $A\subseteq \mathbb{F}_p^n$ that is free of restricted arithmetic progressions? We show that the ... more >>>

We study a natural complexity measure of Boolean functions known as the (exact) rational degree. For total functions $f$, it is conjectured that $\mathrm{rdeg}(f)$ is polynomially related to $\mathrm{deg}(f)$, where $\mathrm{deg}(f)$ is the Fourier degree. Towards this conjecture, we show that symmetric functions have rational degree at least $\mathrm{deg}(f)/2$ and ... more >>>

In an attempt to show that the acceptance probability of a quantum query algorithm making $q$ queries can be well-approximated almost everywhere by a classical decision tree of depth $\leq \text{poly}(q)$, Aaronson and Ambainis proposed the following conjecture: let $f: \{ \pm 1\}^n \rightarrow [0,1]$ be a degree $d$ polynomial ... more >>>