An efficient randomized polynomial identity test for noncommutative
polynomials given by noncommutative arithmetic circuits remains an
open problem. The main bottleneck to applying known techniques is that
a noncommutative circuit of size s can compute a polynomial of
degree exponential in s with a double-exponential number of nonzero
monomials. In this paper, which is a follow-up on our earlier article
[AMR16], we report some progress by dealing with two natural
subcases (both allow for polynomials of exponential degree and a
double exponential number of monomials):

(1) We consider \emph{+-regular} noncommutative circuits: these
are homogeneous noncommutative circuits with the additional
property that all the +-gates are layered, and in each +-layer
all gates have the same syntactic degree. We give a
\emph{white-box} polynomial-time deterministic polynomial identity
test for such circuits. Our algorithm combines some new structural
results for +-regular circuits with known results for
noncommutative ABP identity testing [RS05PIT], rank bound of
commutative depth three identities [SS13], and equivalence
testing problem for words [Loh15, MSU97, Pla94].

(2) Next, we consider \Sigma\Pi^*\Sigma noncommutative circuits:
these are noncommutative circuits with layered +-gates such that
there are only two layers of +-gates. These +-layers are the
output +-gate and linear forms at the bottom layer; between the
+-layers the circuit could have any number of \times gates. We
given an efficient randomized \emph{black-box} identity testing
problem for \Sigma\Pi^*\Sigma circuits. In particular, we show if
f\in\F\angle Z is a nonzero noncommutative polynomial computed by
a \Sigma\Pi^*\Sigma circuit of size s, then f cannot be a
polynomial identity for the matrix algebra \mathbb{M}_s(F), where
the field F is a sufficiently large extension of \F depending on
the degree of f.