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Paper:

TR21-043 | 15th March 2021 22:53

Promise Problems Meet Pseudodeterminism

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TR21-043
Authors: Peter Dixon, A. Pavan, N. V. Vinodchandran
Publication: 18th March 2021 20:14
Downloads: 467
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Abstract:

The Acceptance Probability Estimation Problem (APEP) is to additively approximate the acceptance probability of a Boolean circuit. This problem admits a probabilistic approximation scheme. A central question is whether we can design a pseudodeterministic approximation algorithm for this problem: a probabilistic polynomial-time algorithm that outputs a canonical approximation with high probability. Recently, it was shown that such an algorithm would imply that every approximation algorithm can be made pseudodeterministic (Dixon, Pavan, Vinodchandran; (ITCS 2021).

The main conceptual contribution of this work is to establish that the existence of a pseudodeterministic algorithm for APEP is fundamentally connected to the relationship between probabilistic promise classes and the corresponding standard complexity classes. In particular, we show the following equivalence: every promise problem in PromiseBPP has a solution in BPP if and only if APEP has a pseudodeterministic algorithm. Based on this intuition, we show that pseudodeterministic algorithms for APEP can shed light on a few central topics in complexity theory such as circuit lowerbounds, probabilistic hierarchy theorems, and multi-pseudodeterminism.



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