We study low-degree testing for group-valued functions over a Boolean slice. Specifically given a degree parameter $d$ and oracle access to a function $f:\{0,1\}^n_{n/2} \to G$ where $\{0,1\}^n_k$ denotes the set of vectors in $\{0,1\}^n$ of Hamming weight $k$ and $G$ is an Abelian group (not necessarily finite), the low-degree testing problem asks us to distinguish the case where $f$ is a polynomial of degree at most $d$ (with coefficients from $G$) or is $\varepsilon$-far from the set of all such polynomials. Classical works in this area considered functions with domain $\mathbb{F}_q^n$ and range $\mathbb{F}_q$. More recent works have considered the setting where the domain is the Boolean cube [Bafna, Srinivasan, Sudan (Random Structures and Algorithms 2020), Amireddy, Srinivasan, Sudan (RANDOM 2023)], or when the domain is the slice (i.e., $\{0,1\}^n_{k}$) and the range is $\mathbb{F}_2$ [David, Dinur, Goldenberg, Kindler and Shinkar (SIAM Journal on Computing 2017), Kalai, Lifshitz, Minzer and Ziegler (FOCS 2024)]. Each of the changes introduces new challenges in designing and analyzing low-degree tests and this happens again in our setting with domain being a slice and range is general. Indeed the previous methods fail even when the domain is a Boolean slice and the range is $\mathbb{F}_3$.

Our main theorem gives a test that makes $O_d(1)$ (specifically $\exp(d^{O(1)})$) queries to $f$ and accepts degree-$d$ functions while rejecting functions that are $\varepsilon$-far with probability $\Omega(\varepsilon)$. The central proof idea is to reduce this low-degree testing problem to the problem of low-degree testing on the cube. Specifically we show how to randomly embed the $n/2$-dimensional cube $\{0,1\}^{n/2}$ in the $n$-dimensional slice while nearly preserving the proximity of $f$ to the space of degree-$d$ polynomials on this cube (with high probability). While the embedding is simple and natural, the analysis involves a careful induction (seen in some prior works on low-degree testing) with a novel use of a basis of degree-$d$ polynomials on slices (from a work of Anstee, Rónyai and Sali (Graphs and Combinatorics 2002)). Such a basis of functions is non-trivial and has several nice combinatorial and algebraic closure properties. We show how these properties are useful by using them to analyze our low-degree tests.