We provide a list of new natural VNP-intermediate polynomial
families, based on basic (combinatorial) NP-complete problems that
are complete under \emph{parsimonious} reductions. Over finite
fields, these families are in VNP, and under the plausible
hypothesis $\text{Mod}_pP \not\subseteq P/\text{poly}$, are neither VNP-hard (even under
oracle-circuit reductions) nor in VP. Prior to ... more >>>

Impagliazzo and Wigderson showed that if $\text{E}=\text{DTIME}(2^{O(n)})$ requires size $2^{\Omega(n)}$ circuits, then
every time $T$ constant-error randomized algorithm can be simulated deterministically in time $\poly(T)$. However, such polynomial slowdown is a deal breaker when $T=2^{\alpha \cdot n}$, for a constant $\alpha>0$, as is the case for some randomized algorithms for ... more >>>

We make progress in the following three problems: 1. Constructing optimal seeded non-malleable extractors; 2. Constructing optimal privacy amplification protocols with an active adversary, for any possible security parameter; 3. Constructing extractors for independent weak random sources, when the min-entropy is extremely small (i.e., near logarithmic).

For the first ... more >>>