We study the following question: Is it easier to construct a hitting-set generator for polynomials $p:\mathbb{F}^n\rightarrow\mathbb{F}$ of degree $d$ if we are guaranteed that the polynomial vanishes on at most an $\epsilon>0$ fraction of its inputs? We will specifically be interested in tiny values of $\epsilon\ll d/|\mathbb{F}|$. This question was ... more >>>

In the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP[s(m)]), we ask if there is a circuit of size s(m) computing a given truth-table of length n = 2^m. Recently, a surprising phenomenon termed as hardness magnification by [Oliveira and Santhanam, FOCS 2018] was discovered for MCSP[s(m)] and the related problem MKtP of ... more >>>

In this work we adapt the notion of non-malleability for codes or Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs (ICS 2010) to locally testable codes. Roughly speaking, a locally testable code is non-malleable if any tampered codeword which passes the local test with good probability is close to a valid codeword which either ... more >>>