We initiate the study of the role of erasures in local decoding and use our understanding to prove a separation between erasure-resilient and tolerant property testing. Local decoding in the presence of errors has been extensively studied, but has not been considered explicitly in the presence of erasures.

Motivated by ... more >>>

A graph $G$ is called {\em self-ordered}\/ (a.k.a asymmetric) if the identity permutation is its only automorphism.
Equivalently, there is a unique isomorphism from $G$ to any graph that is isomorphic to $G$.
We say that $G=(V,E)$ is {\em robustly self-ordered}\/ if the size of the symmetric difference ... more >>>

Leveraging tools of De, Mossel, and Neeman [FOCS, 2019], we show two different results pertaining to the tolerant testing of juntas. Given black-box access to a Boolean function $f:\{\pm1\}^{n} \to \{\pm1\}$ we give a poly$(k, \frac{1}{\varepsilon})$ query algorithm that distinguishes between functions that are $\gamma$-close to $k$-juntas and $(\gamma+\varepsilon)$-far from ... more >>>

A natural problem in high-dimensional inference is to decide if a classifier $f:\mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \{-1,1\}$ depends on a small number of linear directions of its input data. Call a function $g: \mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \{-1,1\}$, a linear $k$-junta if it is completely determined by some $k$-dimensional subspace of the input space. ... more >>>