We study the computability of one-way functions and pseudorandom generators
by monotone circuits, showing a substantial gap between the two:
On one hand, there exist one-way functions that are computable
by (uniform) polynomial-size monotone functions, provided (of course)
that one-way functions exist at all.
On the other hand, ... more >>>

We prove a lower bound on the amount of nonuniform advice needed by black-box reductions for the Dense Model Theorem of Green, Tao, and Ziegler, and of Reingold, Trevisan, Tulsiani, and Vadhan. The latter theorem roughly says that for every distribution $D$ that is $\delta$-dense in a distribution that is ... more >>>

We prove that for an arbitrarily small constant $\eps>0,$ assuming NP$\not \subseteq$DTIME$(2^{{\log^{O(1/\epsilon)} n}})$, the preprocessing versions of the closest vector problem and the nearest codeword problem are hard to approximate within a factor better than $2^{\log ^{1-\epsilon}n}.$ This improves upon the previous hardness factor of $(\log n)^\delta$ for some $\delta ... more >>>