Derandomization of blackbox identity testing reduces to extremely special circuit models. After a line of work, it is known that focusing on circuits with constant-depth and constantly many variables is enough (Agrawal,Ghosh,Saxena, STOC'18) to get to general hitting-sets and circuit lower bounds. This inspires us to study circuits with few ... more >>>

We show that for the blackbox polynomial identity testing (PIT) problem it suffices to study circuits that depend only on the first extremely few variables. One only need to consider size-$s$ degree-$s$ circuits that depend on the first $\log^{\circ c} s$ variables (where $c$ is a constant and we are ... more >>>

Unique Games Conjecture (UGC), proposed by [Khot02], lies in the center of many inapproximability results. At the heart of UGC lies approximability of MAX-CUT, which is a special instance of Unique Game.[KhotKMO04, MosselOO05] showed that assuming Unique Games Conjecture, it is NP-hard to distinguish between MAX-CUT instance that has a ... more >>>