We prove a lower bound of $\Omega(n^2/\log^2 n)$ on the size of any syntactically multilinear arithmetic circuit computing some explicit multilinear polynomial $f(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$. Our approach expands and improves upon a result of Raz, Shpilka and Yehudayoff [RSY08], who proved a lower bound of $\Omega(n^{4/3}/\log^2 n)$ for the same ... more >>>

Let $f:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ be a Boolean function. The certificate complexity $C(f)$ is a complexity measure that is quadratically tight for the zero-error randomized query complexity $R_0(f)$: $C(f) \leq R_0(f) \leq C(f)^2$. In this paper we study a new complexity measure that we call expectational certificate complexity $EC(f)$, which is ... more >>>

We construct a pseudorandom generator which fools read-$k$ oblivious branching programs and, more generally, any linear length oblivious branching program, assuming that the sequence according to which the bits are read is known in advance. For polynomial width branching programs, the seed lengths in our constructions are $\tilde{O}(n^{1-1/2^{k-1}})$ (for the ... more >>>