Under the auspices of the Computational Complexity Foundation (CCF)

REPORTS > 2017:
All reports in year 2017:
TR17-001 | 6th January 2017
Stephen Cook, Bruce Kapron

A Survey of Classes of Primitive Recursive Functions

This paper is a transcription of mimeographed course notes titled A Survey of Classes of Primitive Recursive Functions", by S.A. Cook, for the University of California Berkeley course Math 290, Sect. 14, January 1967. The notes present a survey of subrecursive function
classes (and classes of relations based on these ... more >>>

TR17-002 | 6th January 2017
Frantisek Duris

Some notes on two lower bound methods for communication complexity

We compare two methods for proving lower bounds on standard two-party model of communication complexity, the Rank method and Fooling set method. We present bounds on the number of functions $f(x,y)$, $x,y\in\{0,1\}^n$, with rank of size $k$ and fooling set of size at least k, $k\in [1,2^n]$. Using these bounds ... more >>>

TR17-003 | 24th November 2016
Yi Deng

Magic Adversaries Versus Individual Reduction: Science Wins Either Way

Revisions: 1

We prove that \emph{at least} one of the following statements is true:

-- (Infinitely-often) Public-key encryption and key agreement can be based on injective one-way functions;
-- For every inverse polynomial $\epsilon$, the 4-round protocol from [Feige and Shamir, STOC 90] is distributional concurrent zero knowledge for any ... more >>>

TR17-004 | 8th January 2017
Scott Aaronson

P=?NP

In 1955, John Nash sent a remarkable letter to the National Security Agency, in which—seeking to build theoretical foundations for cryptography—he all but formulated what today we call the P=?NP problem, considered one of the great open problems of science. Here I survey the status of this problem in 2017, ... more >>>

TR17-005 | 10th January 2017
Nir Bitansky

Verifiable Random Functions from Non-Interactive Witness-Indistinguishable Proofs

Revisions: 3

Verifiable random functions (VRFs) are pseudorandom functions where the owner of the seed, in addition to computing the function's value $y$ at any point $x$, can also generate a non-interactive proof $\pi$ that $y$ is correct (relative to so), without compromising pseudorandomness at other points. Being a natural primitive with ... more >>>

TR17-006 | 15th December 2016
Constantinos Daskalakis, Nishanth Dikkala, Gautam Kamath

Testing Ising Models

Revisions: 2

Given samples from an unknown multivariate distribution $p$, is it possible to distinguish whether $p$ is the product of its marginals versus $p$ being far from every product distribution? Similarly, is it possible to distinguish whether $p$ equals a given distribution $q$ versus $p$ and $q$ being far from each ... more >>>

TR17-007 | 19th January 2017
Michael Forbes, Amir Shpilka, Ben Lee Volk

Succinct Hitting Sets and Barriers to Proving Algebraic Circuits Lower Bounds

We formalize a framework of algebraically natural lower bounds for algebraic circuits. Just as with the natural proofs notion of Razborov and Rudich for boolean circuit lower bounds, our notion of algebraically natural lower bounds captures nearly all lower bound techniques known. However, unlike the boolean setting, there has been ... more >>>

TR17-008 | 14th January 2017
Benny Applebaum, Naama Haramaty, Yuval Ishai, Eyal Kushilevitz, Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Low-Complexity Cryptographic Hash Functions

Cryptographic hash functions are efficiently computable functions that shrink a long input into a shorter output while achieving some of the useful security properties of a random function. The most common type of such hash functions is {\em collision resistant} hash functions (CRH), which prevent an efficient attacker from finding ... more >>>

TR17-009 | 19th January 2017
Joshua Grochow, Mrinal Kumar, Michael Saks, Shubhangi Saraf

Towards an algebraic natural proofs barrier via polynomial identity testing

We observe that a certain kind of algebraic proof - which covers essentially all known algebraic circuit lower bounds to date - cannot be used to prove lower bounds against VP if and only if what we call succinct hitting sets exist for VP. This is analogous to the Razborov-Rudich ... more >>>

TR17-010 | 18th January 2017
Xiaodi Wu, Penghui Yao, Henry Yuen

Revisions: 1

In this note we show that the Raz-McKenzie simulation algorithm which lifts deterministic query lower bounds to deterministic communication lower bounds can be implemented for functions $f$ composed with the Inner Product gadget $g_{IP}(x,y) = \sum_i x_iy_i \mathrm{mod} \, 2$ of logarithmic size. In other words, given a function $f: ... more >>> TR17-011 | 22nd January 2017 Boaz Barak, Pravesh Kothari, David Steurer Quantum entanglement, sum of squares, and the log rank conjecture For every constant$\epsilon>0$, we give an$\exp(\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n}))$-time algorithm for the$1$vs$1-\epsilon$Best Separable State (BSS) problem of distinguishing, given an$n^2\times n^2$matrix$M$corresponding to a quantum measurement, between the case that there is a separable (i.e., non-entangled) state$\rho$that$M$accepts with probability$1$, ... more >>> TR17-012 | 17th January 2017 Dominik Barth, Moritz Beck, Titus Dose, Christian Glaßer, Larissa Michler, Marc Technau Emptiness Problems for Integer Circuits We study the computational complexity of emptiness problems for circuits over sets of natural numbers with the operations union, intersection, complement, addition, and multiplication. For most settings of allowed operations we precisely characterize the complexity in terms of completeness for classes like NL, NP, and PSPACE. The case where intersection, ... more >>> TR17-013 | 23rd January 2017 Abhishek Bhrushundi, Prahladh Harsha, Srikanth Srinivasan On polynomial approximations over$\mathbb{Z}/2^k\mathbb{Z}$We study approximation of Boolean functions by low-degree polynomials over the ring$\mathbb{Z}/2^k\mathbb{Z}$. More precisely, given a Boolean function F$:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$, define its$k$-lift to be F$_k:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,2^{k-1}\}$by$F_k(x) = 2^{k-F(x)}$(mod$2^k$). We consider the fractional agreement (which we refer to as$\gamma_{d,k}(F)$) of$F_k$with ... more >>> TR17-014 | 23rd January 2017 Arkadev Chattopadhyay, Michal Koucky, Bruno Loff, Sagnik Mukhopadhyay Composition and Simulation Theorems via Pseudo-random Properties We prove a randomized communication-complexity lower bound for a composed OrderedSearch$\circ$IP — by lifting the randomized query-complexity lower-bound of OrderedSearch to the communication-complexity setting. We do this by extending ideas from a paper of Raz and Wigderson. We think that the techniques we develop will be useful in ... more >>> TR17-015 | 4th February 2017 Ilan Komargodski, Moni Naor, Eylon Yogev White-Box vs. Black-Box Complexity of Search Problems: Ramsey and Graph Property Testing Ramsey theory assures us that in any graph there is a clique or independent set of a certain size, roughly logarithmic in the graph size. But how difficult is it to find the clique or independent set? If the graph is given explicitly, then it is possible to do so ... more >>> TR17-016 | 31st January 2017 Vishwas Bhargava, Gábor Ivanyos, Rajat Mittal, Nitin Saxena Irreducibility and deterministic r-th root finding over finite fields Constructing$r$-th nonresidue over a finite field is a fundamental computational problem. A related problem is to construct an irreducible polynomial of degree$r^e$(where$r$is a prime) over a given finite field$\F_q$of characteristic$p$(equivalently, constructing the bigger field$\F_{q^{r^e}}$). Both these problems have famous randomized ... more >>> TR17-017 | 5th February 2017 Michal Moshkovitz, Dana Moshkovitz Mixing Implies Lower Bounds for Space Bounded Learning One can learn any hypothesis class$H$with$O(\log|H|)$labeled examples. Alas, learning with so few examples requires saving the examples in memory, and this requires$|X|^{O(\log|H|)}$memory states, where$X$is the set of all labeled examples. A question that arises is how many labeled examples are needed in ... more >>> TR17-018 | 6th February 2017 Oded Goldreich, Guy Rothblum Simple doubly-efficient interactive proof systems for locally-characterizable sets Revisions: 3 A proof system is called doubly-efficient if the prescribed prover strategy can be implemented in polynomial-time and the verifier's strategy can be implemented in almost-linear-time. We present direct constructions of doubly-efficient interactive proof systems for problems in$\cal P$that are believed to have relatively high complexity. Specifically, such ... more >>> TR17-019 | 8th February 2017 Andreas Krebs, Nutan Limaye, Michael Ludwig A Unified Method for Placing Problems in Polylogarithmic Depth Revisions: 2 In this work we consider the term evaluation problem which involves, given a term over some algebra and a valid input to the term, computing the value of the term on that input. This is a classical problem studied under many names such as formula evaluation problem, formula value problem ... more >>> TR17-020 | 12th February 2017 Ran Raz A Time-Space Lower Bound for a Large Class of Learning Problems We prove a general time-space lower bound that applies for a large class of learning problems and shows that for every problem in that class, any learning algorithm requires either a memory of quadratic size or an exponential number of samples. Our result is stated in terms of the norm ... more >>> TR17-021 | 11th February 2017 Neeraj Kayal, Vineet Nair, Chandan Saha, Sébastien Tavenas Reconstruction of full rank Algebraic Branching Programs An algebraic branching program (ABP) A can be modelled as a product expression$X_1\cdot X_2\cdot \dots \cdot X_d$, where$X_1$and$X_d$are$1 \times w$and$w \times 1$matrices respectively, and every other$X_k$is a$w \times w$matrix; the entries of these matrices are linear forms ... more >>> TR17-022 | 13th February 2017 Benjamin Rossman, Srikanth Srinivasan Separation of AC$^0[\oplus]$Formulas and Circuits This paper gives the first separation between the power of {\em formulas} and {\em circuits} of equal depth in the$\mathrm{AC}^0[\oplus]$basis (unbounded fan-in AND, OR, NOT and MOD$_2$gates). We show, for all$d(n) \le O(\frac{\log n}{\log\log n})$, that there exist {\em polynomial-size depth-$d$circuits} that are not equivalent ... more >>> TR17-023 | 15th February 2017 Russell Impagliazzo, Valentine Kabanets, Ilya Volkovich The Power of Natural Properties as Oracles We study the power of randomized complexity classes that are given oracle access to a natural property of Razborov and Rudich (JCSS, 1997) or its special case, the Minimal Circuit Size Problem (MCSP). We obtain new circuit lower bounds, as well as some hardness results for the relativized version ... more >>> TR17-024 | 16th February 2017 Mika Göös, Pritish Kamath, Toniann Pitassi, Thomas Watson Query-to-Communication Lifting for P^NP We prove that the$\text{P}^{\small\text{NP}}$-type query complexity (alternatively, decision list width) of any boolean function$f$is quadratically related to the$\text{P}^{\small\text{NP}}$-type communication complexity of a lifted version of$f$. As an application, we show that a certain "product" lower bound method of Impagliazzo and Williams (CCC 2010) fails to ... more >>> TR17-025 | 16th February 2017 Pooya Hatami, Avishay Tal Pseudorandom Generators for Low-Sensitivity Functions A Boolean function is said to have maximal sensitivity$s$if$s$is the largest number of Hamming neighbors of a point which differ from it in function value. We construct a pseudorandom generator with seed-length$2^{O(\sqrt{s})} \cdot \log(n)$that fools Boolean functions on$n$variables with maximal sensitivity at ... more >>> TR17-026 | 17th February 2017 Valentine Kabanets, Daniel Kane, Zhenjian Lu A Polynomial Restriction Lemma with Applications A polynomial threshold function (PTF) of degree$d$is a boolean function of the form$f=\mathrm{sgn}(p)$, where$p$is a degree-$d$polynomial, and$\mathrm{sgn}$is the sign function. The main result of the paper is an almost optimal bound on the probability that a random restriction of a PTF is ... more >>> TR17-027 | 16th February 2017 Avraham Ben-Aroya, Eshan Chattopadhyay, Dean Doron, Xin Li, Amnon Ta-Shma A reduction from efficient non-malleable extractors to low-error two-source extractors with arbitrary constant rate Revisions: 1 We show a reduction from the existence of explicit t-non-malleable extractors with a small seed length, to the construction of explicit two-source extractors with small error for sources with arbitrarily small constant rate. Previously, such a reduction was known either when one source had entropy rate above half [Raz05] or ... more >>> TR17-028 | 17th February 2017 Mrinal Kumar A quadratic lower bound for homogeneous algebraic branching programs Revisions: 1 An algebraic branching program (ABP) is a directed acyclic graph, with a start vertex$s$, and end vertex$t$and each edge having a weight which is an affine form in$\F[x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n]$. An ABP computes a polynomial in a natural way, as the sum of weights of ... more >>> TR17-029 | 18th February 2017 Clement Canonne, Tom Gur An Adaptivity Hierarchy Theorem for Property Testing Revisions: 1 Adaptivity is known to play a crucial role in property testing. In particular, there exist properties for which there is an exponential gap between the power of \emph{adaptive} testing algorithms, wherein each query may be determined by the answers received to prior queries, and their \emph{non-adaptive} counterparts, in which all ... more >>> TR17-030 | 15th February 2017 Amey Bhangale, Subhash Khot, Devanathan Thiruvenkatachari An Improved Dictatorship Test with Perfect Completeness A Boolean function$f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}$is called a dictator if it depends on exactly one variable i.e$f(x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n) = x_i$for some$i\in [n]$. In this work, we study a$k$-query dictatorship test. Dictatorship tests are central in proving many hardness results for constraint satisfaction problems. ... more >>> TR17-031 | 15th February 2017 Thomas Watson Quadratic Simulations of Merlin-Arthur Games The known proofs of$\text{MA}\subseteq\text{PP}$incur a quadratic overhead in the running time. We prove that this quadratic overhead is necessary for black-box simulations; in particular, we obtain an oracle relative to which$\text{MA-TIME}(t)\not\subseteq\text{P-TIME}(o(t^2))$. We also show that 2-sided-error Merlin--Arthur games can be simulated by 1-sided-error Arthur--Merlin games with quadratic ... more >>> TR17-032 | 17th February 2017 Olaf Beyersdorff, Joshua Blinkhorn Formulas with Large Weight: a New Technique for Genuine QBF Lower Bounds We devise a new technique to prove lower bounds for the proof size in resolution-type calculi for quantified Boolean formulas (QBF). The new technique applies to the strong expansion system IR-calc and thereby also to the most studied QBF system Q-Resolution. Our technique exploits a clear semantic paradigm, showing the ... more >>> TR17-033 | 19th February 2017 Daniel Kane, Shachar Lovett, Sankeerth Rao Labeling the complete bipartite graph with no zero cycles Revisions: 2 Assume that the edges of the complete bipartite graph$K_{n,n}$are labeled with elements of$\mathbb{F}_2^d$, such that the sum over any simple cycle is nonzero. What is the smallest possible value of$d$? This problem was raised by Gopalan et al. [SODA 2017] as it characterizes the alphabet size ... more >>> TR17-034 | 21st February 2017 Karl Bringmann, Christian Ikenmeyer, Jeroen Zuiddam On algebraic branching programs of small width Revisions: 1 In 1979 Valiant showed that the complexity class VP_e of families with polynomially bounded formula size is contained in the class VP_s of families that have algebraic branching programs (ABPs) of polynomially bounded size. Motivated by the problem of separating these classes we study the topological closure VP_e-bar, i.e. the ... more >>> TR17-035 | 23rd February 2017 Manindra Agrawal, Michael Forbes, Sumanta Ghosh, Nitin Saxena Small hitting-sets for tiny arithmetic circuits or: How to turn bad designs into good Research in the last decade has shown that to prove lower bounds or to derandomize polynomial identity testing (PIT) for general arithmetic circuits it suffices to solve these questions for restricted circuits. In this work, we study the smallest possibly restricted class of circuits, in particular depth-$4$circuits, which would ... more >>> TR17-036 | 22nd February 2017 Dean Doron, Francois Le Gall, Amnon Ta-Shma Probabilistic logarithmic-space algorithms for Laplacian solvers A recent series of breakthroughs initiated by Spielman and Teng culminated in the construction of nearly linear time Laplacian solvers, approximating the solution of a linear system$L x=b$, where$L$is the normalized Laplacian of an undirected graph. In this paper we study the space complexity of the problem. more >>> TR17-037 | 25th February 2017 Olaf Beyersdorff, Leroy Chew, Meena Mahajan, Anil Shukla Understanding Cutting Planes for QBFs We define a cutting planes system CP+$\forall$red for quantified Boolean formulas (QBF) and analyse the proof-theoretic strength of this new calculus. While in the propositional case, Cutting Planes is of intermediate strength between resolution and Frege, our findings here show that the situation in QBF is slightly more complex: while ... more >>> TR17-038 | 23rd February 2017 Benny Applebaum, Barak Arkis, Pavel Raykov, Prashant Nalini Vasudevan Conditional Disclosure of Secrets: Amplification, Closure, Amortization, Lower-bounds, and Separations Revisions: 1 In the \emph{conditional disclosure of secrets} problem (Gertner et al., J. Comput. Syst. Sci., 2000) Alice and Bob, who hold inputs$x$and$y$respectively, wish to release a common secret$s$to Carol (who knows both$x$and$y$) if only if the input$(x,y)$satisfies some predefined predicate ... more >>> TR17-039 | 28th February 2017 Marshall Ball, Alon Rosen, Manuel Sabin, Prashant Nalini Vasudevan Average-Case Fine-Grained Hardness We present functions that can be computed in some fixed polynomial time but are hard on average for any algorithm that runs in slightly smaller time, assuming widely-conjectured worst-case hardness for problems from the study of fine-grained complexity. Unconditional constructions of such functions are known from before (Goldmann et al., ... more >>> TR17-040 | 4th March 2017 Sivaramakrishnan Natarajan Ramamoorthy, Anup Rao Non-Adaptive Data Structure Lower Bounds for Median and Predecessor Search from Sunflowers Revisions: 2 We prove new cell-probe lower bounds for data structures that maintain a subset of$\{1,2,...,n\}$, and compute the median of the set. The data structure is said to handle insertions non-adaptively if the locations of memory accessed depend only on the element being inserted, and not on the contents of ... more >>> TR17-041 | 6th March 2017 Amnon Ta-Shma Explicit, almost optimal, epsilon-balanced codes The question of finding an epsilon-biased set with close to optimal support size, or, equivalently, finding an explicit binary code with distance$\frac{1-\epsilon}{2}$and rate close to the Gilbert-Varshamov bound, attracted a lot of attention in recent decades. In this paper we solve the problem almost optimally and show an ... more >>> TR17-042 | 6th March 2017 Pavel Hrubes, Pavel Pudlak Random formulas, monotone circuits, and interpolation We prove new lower bounds on the sizes of proofs in the Cutting Plane proof system, using a concept that we call "unsatisfiability certificate". This approach is, essentially, equivalent to the well-known feasible interpolation method, but is applicable to CNF formulas that do not seem suitable for interpolation. Specifically, we ... more >>> TR17-043 | 3rd March 2017 Alexey Milovanov, Nikolay Vereshchagin Stochasticity in Algorithmic Statistics for Polynomial Time A fundamental notion in Algorithmic Statistics is that of a stochastic object, i.e., an object having a simple plausible explanation. Informally, a probability distribution is a plausible explanation for$x$if it looks likely that$x$was drawn at random with respect to that distribution. In this paper, we ... more >>> TR17-044 | 21st February 2017 Olaf Beyersdorff, Luke Hinde, Ján Pich Reasons for Hardness in QBF Proof Systems Revisions: 1 We aim to understand inherent reasons for lower bounds for QBF proof systems and revisit and compare two previous approaches in this direction. The first of these relates size lower bounds for strong QBF Frege systems to circuit lower bounds via strategy extraction (Beyersdorff & Pich, LICS'16). Here we ... more >>> TR17-045 | 7th March 2017 Noah Fleming, Denis Pankratov, Toniann Pitassi, Robert Robere Random CNFs are Hard for Cutting Planes Revisions: 1 The random k-SAT model is the most important and well-studied distribution over k-SAT instances. It is closely connected to statistical physics; it is used as a testbench for satisfiablity algorithms, and lastly average-case hardness over this distribution has also been linked to hardness of approximation via Feige’s hypothesis. In this ... more >>> TR17-046 | 8th March 2017 Sebastian Berndt, Maciej Li\'skiewicz, Matthias Lutter, Rüdiger Reischuk Learning Residual Alternating Automata Residuality plays an essential role for learning finite automata. While residual deterministic and nondeterministic automata have been understood quite well, fundamental questions concerning alternating automata (AFA) remain open. Recently, Angluin, Eisenstat, and Fisman have initiated a systematic study of residual AFAs and proposed an algorithm called AL* -an extension of ... more >>> TR17-047 | 10th March 2017 Kasper Green Larsen, Omri Weinstein, Huacheng Yu Crossing the Logarithmic Barrier for Dynamic Boolean Data Structure Lower Bounds This paper proves the first super-logarithmic lower bounds on the cell probe complexity of dynamic \emph{boolean} (a.k.a. decision) data structure problems, a long-standing milestone in data structure lower bounds. We introduce a new method for proving dynamic cell probe lower bounds and use it to prove a$\tilde{\Omega}(\log^{1.5} ... more >>>

TR17-048 | 14th March 2017
Pavel Hrubes, Pavel Pudlak

A note on monotone real circuits

We show that if a Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n\to \{0,1\}$ can be computed by a monotone real circuit of size $s$ using $k$-ary monotone gates then $f$ can be computed by a monotone real circuit of size $O(sn^{k-2})$ which uses unary or binary monotone gates only. This partially solves an open ... more >>>

TR17-049 | 14th March 2017
Roksana Baleshzar, Deeparnab Chakrabarty, Ramesh Krishnan S. Pallavoor, Sofya Raskhodnikova, C. Seshadhri

Optimal Unateness Testers for Real-Valued Functions: Adaptivity Helps

We study the problem of testing unateness of functions $f:\{0,1\}^d \to \mathbb{R}.$ We give a $O(\frac{d}{\epsilon} \cdot \log\frac{d}{\epsilon})$-query nonadaptive tester and a $O(\frac{d}{\epsilon})$-query adaptive tester and show that both testers are optimal for a fixed distance parameter $\epsilon$. Previously known unateness testers worked only for Boolean functions, and their query ... more >>>

TR17-050 | 15th March 2017
Joe Boninger, Joshua Brody, Owen Kephart

Non-Adaptive Data Structure Bounds for Dynamic Predecessor Search

In this work, we continue the examination of the role non-adaptivity} plays in maintaining dynamic data structures, initiated by Brody and Larsen [BL15].. We consider nonadaptive data structures for predecessor search in the w-bit cell probe model. Predecessor search is one of the most well-studied data structure problems. For this ... more >>>

TR17-051 | 16th March 2017
Mark Bun, Justin Thaler

A Nearly Optimal Lower Bound on the Approximate Degree of AC$^0$

The approximate degree of a Boolean function $f \colon \{-1, 1\}^n \rightarrow \{-1, 1\}$ is the least degree of a real polynomial that approximates $f$ pointwise to error at most $1/3$. We introduce a generic method for increasing the approximate degree of a given function, while preserving its computability by ... more >>>

TR17-052 | 19th March 2017
Dieter van Melkebeek, Gautam Prakriya

Derandomizing Isolation in Space-Bounded Settings

We study the possibility of deterministic and randomness-efficient isolation in space-bounded models of computation: Can one efficiently reduce instances of computational problems to equivalent instances that have at most one solution? We present results for the NL-complete problem of reachability on digraphs, and for the LogCFL-complete problem of certifying acceptance ... more >>>

TR17-053 | 22nd March 2017
Mika Göös, Toniann Pitassi, Thomas Watson

Query-to-Communication Lifting for BPP

For any $n$-bit boolean function $f$, we show that the randomized communication complexity of the composed function $f\circ g^n$, where $g$ is an index gadget, is characterized by the randomized decision tree complexity of $f$. In particular, this means that many query complexity separations involving randomized models (e.g., classical vs.\ ... more >>>

TR17-054 | 22nd March 2017
Anurag Anshu, Naresh Goud, Rahul Jain, Srijita Kundu, Priyanka Mukhopadhyay

Lifting randomized query complexity to randomized communication complexity

Revisions: 4

We show that for any (partial) query function $f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}$, the randomized communication complexity of $f$ composed with $\mathrm{Index}^n_m$ (with $m= \poly(n)$) is at least the randomized query complexity of $f$ times $\log n$. Here $\mathrm{Index}_m : [m] \times \{0,1\}^m \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ is defined as $\mathrm{Index}_m(x,y)= y_x$ (the $x$th bit ... more >>>

TR17-055 | 26th March 2017
Maya Leshkowitz

Round Complexity Versus Randomness Complexity in Interactive Proofs

Consider an interactive proof system for some set S that has randomness complexity r(n) for instances of length n, and arbitrary round complexity. We show a public-coin interactive proof system for S of round complexity O(r(n)/log n). Furthermore, the randomness complexity is preserved up to a constant factor, and the ... more >>>

TR17-056 | 7th April 2017

Towards a Unified Complexity Theory of Total Functions

Revisions: 1

The complexity class TFNP is the set of {\em total function} problems that belong to NP: every input has at least one output and outputs are easy to check for validity, but it may be hard to find an output. TFNP is not believed to have complete problems, but it ... more >>>

TR17-057 | 7th April 2017
Alessandro Chiesa, Michael Forbes, Nicholas Spooner

A Zero Knowledge Sumcheck and its Applications

Many seminal results in Interactive Proofs (IPs) use algebraic techniques based on low-degree polynomials, the study of which is pervasive in theoretical computer science. Unfortunately, known methods for endowing such proofs with zero knowledge guarantees do not retain this rich algebraic structure.

In this work, we develop algebraic techniques for ... more >>>

TR17-058 | 7th April 2017
Noga Alon, Omri Ben-Eliezer, Eldar Fischer

Testing hereditary properties of ordered graphs and matrices

Revisions: 1

We consider properties of edge-colored vertex-ordered graphs, i.e., graphs with a totally ordered vertex set and a finite set of possible edge colors. We show that any hereditary property of such graphs is strongly testable, i.e., testable with a constant number of queries.
We also explain how the proof can ... more >>>

TR17-059 | 6th April 2017
Ola Svensson, Jakub Tarnawski

The Matching Problem in General Graphs is in Quasi-NC

Revisions: 1

We show that the perfect matching problem in general graphs is in Quasi-NC. That is, we give a deterministic parallel algorithm which runs in $O(\log^3 n)$ time on $n^{O(\log^2 n)}$ processors. The result is obtained by a derandomization of the Isolation Lemma for perfect matchings, which was introduced in the ... more >>>

TR17-060 | 9th April 2017
Boaz Barak, Zvika Brakerski, Ilan Komargodski, Pravesh Kothari

Limits on Low-Degree Pseudorandom Generators (Or: Sum-of-Squares Meets Program Obfuscation)

Revisions: 1

We prove that for every function $G\colon\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^m$, if every output of $G$ is a polynomial (over $\mathbb{R}$) of degree at most $d$ of at most $s$ monomials and $m > \widetilde{O}(sn^{\lceil d/2 \rceil})$, then there is a polynomial time algorithm that can distinguish a vector of the form ... more >>>

TR17-061 | 3rd April 2017
Anat Ganor, Karthik C. S.

Communication Complexity of Correlated Equilibrium in Two-Player Games

We show a communication complexity lower bound for finding a correlated equilibrium of a two-player game. More precisely, we define a two-player $N \times N$ game called the 2-cycle game and show that the randomized communication complexity of finding a 1/poly($N$)-approximate correlated equilibrium of the 2-cycle game is $\Omega(N)$. For ... more >>>

TR17-062 | 9th April 2017

Dual polynomials and communication complexity of XOR functions

We show a new duality between the polynomial margin complexity of $f$ and the discrepancy of the function $f \circ$ XOR, called an XOR function. Using this duality,
we develop polynomial based techniques for understanding the bounded error (BPP) and the weakly-unbounded error (PP) communication complexities of XOR functions. ... more >>>

TR17-063 | 10th April 2017
Benny Applebaum

Exponentially-Hard gap-CSP and local PRG via Local Hardcore Functions

The gap-ETH assumption (Dinur 2016; Manurangsi and Raghavendra 2016) asserts that it is exponentially-hard to distinguish between a satisfiable 3-CNF formula and a 3-CNF formula which is at most 0.99-satisfiable. We show that this assumption follows from the exponential hardness of finding a satisfying assignment for *smooth* 3-CNFs. Here smoothness ... more >>>

TR17-064 | 20th April 2017
Venkatesan Guruswami, Chaoping Xing, chen yuan

Subspace Designs based on Algebraic Function Fields

Subspace designs are a (large) collection of high-dimensional subspaces $\{H_i\}$ of $\F_q^m$ such that for any low-dimensional subspace $W$, only a small number of subspaces from the collection have non-trivial intersection with $W$; more precisely, the sum of dimensions of $W \cap H_i$ is at most some parameter $L$. The ... more >>>

TR17-065 | 20th April 2017
Boaz Barak

The Complexity of Public-Key Cryptograph

We survey the computational foundations for public-key cryptography. We discuss the computational assumptions that have been used as bases for public-key encryption schemes, and the types of evidence we have for the veracity of these assumptions.

This is a survey that appeared in a book of surveys in honor of ... more >>>

TR17-066 | 20th April 2017
Josh Alman, Joshua Wang, Huacheng Yu

Cell-Probe Lower Bounds from Online Communication Complexity

Revisions: 1

In this work, we introduce an online model for communication complexity. Analogous to how online algorithms receive their input piece-by-piece, our model presents one of the players Bob his input piece-by-piece, and has the players Alice and Bob cooperate to compute a result it presents Bob with the next piece. ... more >>>

TR17-067 | 21st April 2017
Benny Applebaum

Garbled Circuits as Randomized Encodings of Functions: a Primer

Yao's garbled circuit construction is a central cryptographic tool with numerous applications. In this tutorial, we study garbled circuits from a foundational point of view under the framework of \emph{randomized encoding} (RE) of functions. We review old and new constructions of REs, present some lower bounds, and describe some applications. ... more >>>

TR17-068 | 20th April 2017
Xi Chen, Rocco Servedio, Li-Yang Tan, Erik Waingarten, Jinyu Xie

Settling the query complexity of non-adaptive junta testing

We prove that any non-adaptive algorithm that tests whether an unknown
Boolean function $f\colon \{0, 1\}^n\to\{0, 1\}$ is a $k$-junta or $\epsilon$-far from every $k$-junta must make $\widetilde{\Omega}(k^{3/2} / \epsilon)$ many queries for a wide range of parameters $k$ and $\epsilon$. Our result dramatically improves previous lower ... more >>>

TR17-069 | 17th April 2017
Jacob Steinhardt

Does robustness imply tractability? A lower bound for planted clique in the semi-random model

We consider a robust analog of the planted clique problem. In this analog, a set $S$ of vertices is chosen and all edges in $S$ are included; then, edges between $S$ and the rest of the graph are included with probability $\frac{1}{2}$, while edges not touching $S$ are allowed to ... more >>>

TR17-070 | 15th April 2017
Shachar Lovett, Sankeerth Rao, Alex Vardy

Probabilistic Existence of Large Sets of Designs

A new probabilistic technique for establishing the existence of certain regular combinatorial structures has been introduced by Kuperberg, Lovett, and Peled (STOC 2012). Using this technique, it can be shown that under certain conditions, a randomly chosen structure has the required properties of a $t-(n,k,?)$ combinatorial design with tiny, yet ... more >>>

TR17-071 | 14th April 2017
Young Kun Ko, Arial Schvartzman

Bounds for the Communication Complexity of Two-Player Approximate Correlated Equilibria

Revisions: 1

In the recent paper of~\cite{BR16}, the authors show that, for any constant $10^{-15} > \varepsilon > 0$ the communication complexity of $\varepsilon$-approximate Nash equilibria in $2$-player $n \times n$ games is $n^{\Omega(\varepsilon)}$, resolving the long open problem of whether or not there exists a polylogarithmic communication protocol. In this paper ... more >>>

TR17-072 | 25th April 2017
Eric Allender, Andreas Krebs, Pierre McKenzie

Better Complexity Bounds for Cost Register Machines

Revisions: 1

Cost register automata (CRA) are one-way finite automata whose transitions have the side effect that a register is set to the result of applying a state-dependent semiring operation to a pair of registers. Here it is shown that CRAs over the semiring (N,min,+) can simulate polynomial time computation, proving along ... more >>>

TR17-073 | 28th April 2017
Eric Allender, Shuichi Hirahara

New Insights on the (Non)-Hardness of Circuit Minimization and Related Problems

The Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) and a related problem (MKTP) that deals with time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity are prominent candidates for NP-intermediate status. We show that, under very modest cryptographic assumptions (such as the existence of one-way functions), the problem of approximating the minimum circuit size (or time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity) ... more >>>

TR17-074 | 29th April 2017
Vikraman Arvind, Rajit Datta, Partha Mukhopadhyay, Raja S

Efficient Identity Testing and Polynomial Factorization over Non-associative Free Rings

Revisions: 1

In this paper we study arithmetic computations over non-associative, and non-commutative free polynomials ring $\mathbb{F}\{x_1,x_2,\ldots,x_n\}$. Prior to this work, the non-associative arithmetic model of computation was considered by Hrubes, Wigderson, and Yehudayoff [HWY10]. They were interested in completeness and explicit lower bound results.

We focus on two main problems ... more >>>

TR17-075 | 29th April 2017
Clement Canonne, Ilias Diakonikolas, Alistair Stewart

Fourier-Based Testing for Families of Distributions

Revisions: 1

We study the general problem of testing whether an unknown discrete distribution belongs to a given family of distributions. More specifically, given a class of distributions $\mathcal{P}$ and sample access to an unknown distribution $\mathbf{P}$, we want to distinguish (with high probability) between the case that $\mathbf{P} \in \mathcal{P}$ and ... more >>>

TR17-076 | 21st April 2017
Tianren Liu, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Hoeteck Wee

New Protocols for Conditional Disclosure of Secrets (and More)

Revisions: 2

We present new protocols for conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS),
where two parties want to disclose a secret to a third party if and
only if their respective inputs satisfy some predicate.

- For general predicates $\text{pred} : [N] \times [N] \rightarrow \{0,1\}$,
we present two protocols that achieve ... more >>>

TR17-077 | 30th April 2017
Guillaume Lagarde, Nutan Limaye, Srikanth Srinivasan

Lower Bounds and PIT for Non-Commutative Arithmetic circuits with Restricted Parse Trees

We investigate the power of Non-commutative Arithmetic Circuits, which compute polynomials over the free non-commutative polynomial ring $\mathbb{F}\langle x_1,\dots,x_N \rangle$, where variables do not commute. We consider circuits that are restricted in the ways in which they can compute monomials: this can be seen as restricting the families of parse ... more >>>

TR17-078 | 21st April 2017
Nico Döttling, Jesper Buus Nielsen, Maceij Obremski

Information Theoretic Continuously Non-Malleable Codes in the Constant Split-State Model

Revisions: 1

We present an information-theoretically secure continuously non-malleable code in the constant split-state model, where there is a self-destruct mechanism which ensures that the adversary loses access to tampering after the first failed decoding. Prior to our result only codes with computational security were known for this model, and it has ... more >>>

TR17-079 | 1st May 2017
Alexander A. Sherstov, Pei Wu

Optimal Interactive Coding for Insertions, Deletions, and Substitutions

Interactive coding, pioneered by Schulman (FOCS 1992, STOC 1993), is concerned with making communication protocols resilient to adversarial noise. The canonical model allows the adversary to alter a small constant fraction of symbols, chosen at the adversary's discretion, as they pass through the communication channel. Braverman, Gelles, Mao, and Ostrovsky ... more >>>

TR17-080 | 1st May 2017
Joshua Brakensiek, Venkatesan Guruswami

The Quest for Strong Inapproximability Results with Perfect Completeness

The Unique Games Conjecture (UGC) has pinned down the approximability of all constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), showing that a natural semidefinite programming relaxation offers the optimal worst-case approximation ratio for any CSP. This elegant picture, however, does not apply for CSP instances that are perfectly satisfiable, due to the imperfect ... more >>>

TR17-081 | 2nd May 2017

The Power of Shared Randomness in Uncertain Communication

In a recent work (Ghazi et al., SODA 2016), the authors with Komargodski and Kothari initiated the study of communication with contextual uncertainty, a setup aiming to understand how efficient communication is possible when the communicating parties imperfectly share a huge context. In this setting, Alice is given a function ... more >>>

TR17-082 | 4th May 2017
Daniel Kane, Shachar Lovett, Shay Moran

Near-optimal linear decision trees for k-SUM and related problems

We construct near optimal linear decision trees for a variety of decision problems in combinatorics and discrete geometry.
For example, for any constant $k$, we construct linear decision trees that solve the $k$-SUM problem on $n$ elements using $O(n \log^2 n)$ linear queries.
Moreover, the queries we use are comparison ... more >>>

TR17-083 | 5th May 2017

Weights at the Bottom Matter When the Top is Heavy

Revisions: 1

Proving super-polynomial lower bounds against depth-2 threshold circuits of the form THR of THR is a well-known open problem that represents a frontier of our understanding in boolean circuit complexity. By contrast, exponential lower bounds on the size of THR of MAJ circuits were shown by Razborov and Sherstov (SIAM ... more >>>

TR17-084 | 2nd May 2017

The Many Entropies in One-Way Functions

Revisions: 1

Computational analogues of information-theoretic notions have given rise to some of the most interesting phenomena in the theory of computation. For example, computational indistinguishability, Goldwasser and Micali '84, which is the computational analogue of statistical distance, enabled the bypassing of Shanon's impossibility results on perfectly secure encryption, and provided the ... more >>>

TR17-085 | 4th May 2017
Daniel Kane, Shachar Lovett, Shay Moran, Jiapeng Zhang

Active classification with comparison queries

We study an extension of active learning in which the learning algorithm may ask the annotator to compare the distances of two examples from the boundary of their label-class. For example, in a recommendation system application (say for restaurants), the annotator may be asked whether she liked or disliked a ... more >>>

TR17-086 | 9th May 2017
C Ramya, Raghavendra Rao B V

Linear Projections of the Vandermonde Polynomial

Revisions: 1

An n-variate Vandermonde polynomial is the determinant of the n × n matrix where the ith column is the vector (1, x_i , x_i^2 , . . . , x_i^{n-1})^T. Vandermonde polynomials play a crucial role in the in the theory of alternating polynomials and occur in Lagrangian polynomial interpolation ... more >>>

TR17-087 | 9th May 2017
Pushkar Joglekar, Raghavendra Rao B V, Sidhartha Sivakumar

On Weak-Space Complexity over Complex Numbers

Defining a feasible notion of space over the Blum-Shub-Smale (BSS) model of algebraic computation is a long standing open problem. In an attempt to define a right notion of space complexity for the BSS model, Naurois [CiE, 2007] introduced the notion of weak-space. We investigate the weak-space bounded computations and ... more >>>

TR17-088 | 10th May 2017
Elena Grigorescu, Akash Kumar, Karl Wimmer

K-Monotonicity is Not Testable on the Hypercube

Revisions: 1

We continue the study of $k$-monotone Boolean functions in the property testing model, initiated by Canonne et al. (ITCS 2017). A function $f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}$ is said to be $k$-monotone if it alternates between $0$ and $1$ at most $k$ times on every ascending chain. Such functions represent a natural generalization ... more >>>

TR17-089 | 11th May 2017
Irit Dinur, Tali Kaufman

High dimensional expanders imply agreement expanders

We show that high dimensional expanders imply derandomized direct product tests, with a number of subsets that is *linear* in the size of the universe.

Direct product tests belong to a family of tests called agreement tests that are important components in PCP constructions and include, for example, low degree ... more >>>

TR17-090 | 15th May 2017
Chin Ho Lee, Emanuele Viola

The coin problem for product tests

Let $X_{m, \eps}$ be the distribution over $m$ bits $(X_1, \ldots, X_m)$
where the $X_i$ are independent and each $X_i$ equals $1$ with
probability $(1+\eps)/2$ and $0$ with probability $(1-\eps)/2$. We
consider the smallest value $\eps^*$ of $\eps$ such that the distributions
$X_{m,\eps}$ and $X_{m,0}$ can be distinguished with constant
more >>>

TR17-091 | 17th May 2017
Andrej Bogdanov

Small bias requires large formulas

Revisions: 1

A small-biased function is a randomized function whose distribution of truth-tables is small-biased. We demonstrate that known explicit lower bounds on the size of (1) general Boolean formulas, (2) Boolean formulas of fan-in two, (3) de Morgan formulas, as well as (4) correlation lower bounds against small de Morgan formulas ... more >>>

TR17-092 | 10th May 2017
Shuichi Hirahara

A Duality Between Depth-Three Formulas and Approximation by Depth-Two

We establish an explicit link between depth-3 formulas and one-sided approximation by depth-2 formulas, which were previously studied independently. Specifically, we show that the minimum size of depth-3 formulas is (up to a factor of n) equal to the inverse of the maximum, over all depth-2 formulas, of one-sided-error correlation ... more >>>

TR17-093 | 22nd May 2017
Klim Efremenko, Gillat Kol, Raghuvansh Saxena

Interactive Coding Over the Noisy Broadcast Channel

A set of $n$ players, each holding a private input bit, communicate over a noisy broadcast channel. Their mutual goal is for all players to learn all inputs. At each round one of the players broadcasts a bit to all the other players, and the bit received by each player ... more >>>

TR17-094 | 25th May 2017
Irit Dinur, Subhash Khot, Guy Kindler, Dor Minzer, Muli Safra

On Non-Optimally Expanding Sets in Grassmann Graphs

The paper investigates expansion properties of the Grassmann graph,
motivated by recent results of [KMS, DKKMS] concerning hardness
of the Vertex-Cover and of the $2$-to-$1$ Games problems. Proving the
hypotheses put forward by these papers seems to first require a better
understanding of these expansion properties.

We consider the edge ... more >>>

TR17-095 | 26th May 2017
Ran Gelles, Yael Tauman Kalai

Constant-Rate Interactive Coding Is Impossible, Even In Constant-Degree Networks

Multiparty interactive coding allows a network of $n$ parties to perform distributed computations when the communication channels suffer from noise. Previous results (Rajagopalan and Schulman, STOC '94) obtained a multiparty interactive coding protocol, resilient to random noise, with a blowup of $O(\log(\Delta+1))$ for networks whose topology has a maximal degree ... more >>>

TR17-096 | 30th May 2017
Irit Dinur, Inbal Livni Navon

Exponentially Small Soundness for the Direct Product Z-test

Given a function $f:[N]^k\rightarrow[M]^k$, the Z-test is a three query test for checking if a function $f$ is a direct product, namely if there are functions $g_1,\dots g_k:[N]\to[M]$ such that $f(x_1,\ldots,x_k)=(g_1(x_1),\dots g_k(x_k))$ for every input $x\in [N]^k$.

This test was introduced by Impagliazzo et. al. (SICOMP 2012), who ... more >>>

TR17-097 | 31st May 2017
Itay Berman, Akshay Degwekar, Ron Rothblum, Prashant Nalini Vasudevan

Multi Collision Resistant Hash Functions and their Applications

Revisions: 1

Collision resistant hash functions are functions that shrink their input, but for which it is computationally infeasible to find a collision, namely two strings that hash to the same value (although collisions are abundant).

In this work we study multi-collision resistant hash functions (MCRH) a natural relaxation of collision resistant ... more >>>

TR17-098 | 28th May 2017
Raman Arora, Amitabh Basu , Poorya Mianjy, Anirbit Mukherjee

Understanding Deep Neural Networks with Rectified Linear Units

Revisions: 2

In this paper we investigate the family of functions representable by deep neural networks (DNN) with rectified linear units (ReLU). We give the first-ever polynomial time (in the size of data) algorithm to train to global optimality a ReLU DNN with one hidden layer, assuming the input dimension and number ... more >>>

TR17-099 | 5th June 2017
Nir Bitansky, Omer Paneth, Yael Tauman Kalai

Multi-Collision Resistance: A Paradigm for Keyless Hash Functions

Revisions: 1

We study multi-collision-resistant hash functions --- a natural relaxation of collision-resistant hashing that only guarantees the intractability of finding many (rather than two) inputs that map to the same image. An appealing feature of such hash functions is that unlike their collision-resistant counterparts, they do not necessarily require a key. ... more >>>

TR17-100 | 7th June 2017
Dakshita Khurana, Amit Sahai

How to Achieve Non-Malleability in One or Two Rounds

Despite over 25 years of research on non-malleable commitments in the plain model, their round complexity has remained open. The goal of achieving non-malleable commitment protocols with only one or two rounds has been especially elusive. Pass (TCC 2013, CC 2016) captured this difficulty by proving important impossibility results regarding ... more >>>

TR17-101 | 8th June 2017
Oded Goldreich

On the doubly-efficient interactive proof systems of GKR

Revisions: 1

We present a somewhat simpler variant of the doubly-efficient interactive proof systems of Goldwasser, Kalai, and Rothblum (JACM, 2015).
Recall that these proof systems apply to log-space uniform sets in NC (or, more generally, to inputs that are acceptable by log-space uniform bounded-depth circuits, where the number of rounds in ... more >>>

TR17-102 | 9th June 2017
Oded Goldreich

Overview of the doubly-efficient interactive proof systems of RRR

We provide an overview of the doubly-efficient interactive proof systems of Reingold, Rothblum, and Rothblum (STOC, 2016).
Recall that by their result, any set that is decidable in polynomial-time by an algorithm of space complexity $s(n)\leq n^{0.499}$, has a constant-round interactive proof system
in which the prover runs polynomial time ... more >>>

TR17-103 | 12th June 2017
Ramesh Krishnan S. Pallavoor, Sofya Raskhodnikova, Nithin Varma

Parameterized Property Testing of Functions

We investigate the parameters in terms of which the complexity of sublinear-time algorithms should be expressed. Our goal is to find input parameters that are tailored to the combinatorics of the specific problem being studied and design algorithms that run faster when these parameters are small. This direction enables us ... more >>>

TR17-104 | 13th June 2017
Brett Hemenway, Noga Ron-Zewi, Mary Wootters

Local List Recovery of High-rate Tensor Codes & Applications

In this work, we give the first construction of {\em high-rate} locally list-recoverable codes. List-recovery has been an extremely useful building block in coding theory, and our motivation is to use these codes as such a building block.
In particular, our construction gives the first {\em capacity-achieving} locally list-decodable ... more >>>

TR17-105 | 14th June 2017
Shafi Goldwasser, Ofer Grossman, Dhiraj Holden

Pseudo-Deterministic Proofs

We introduce pseudo-deterministic interactive proofs (psdAM): interactive proof systems for search problems where
the verifier is guaranteed with high probability to output the same output on different executions.
As in the case with classical interactive proofs,
the verifier is a probabilistic polynomial time algorithm interacting with an untrusted powerful prover.

... more >>>

TR17-106 | 16th June 2017
Mateus de Oliveira Oliveira, Pavel Pudlak

Representations of Monotone Boolean Functions by Linear Programs

We introduce the notion of monotone linear programming circuits (MLP circuits), a model of
computation for partial Boolean functions. Using this model, we prove the following results:

1. MLP circuits are superpolynomially stronger than monotone Boolean circuits.
2. MLP circuits are exponentially stronger than monotone span programs.
3. ... more >>>

TR17-107 | 1st June 2017
Anurag Anshu, Dmitry Gavinsky, Rahul Jain, Srijita Kundu, Troy Lee, Priyanka Mukhopadhyay, Miklos Santha, Swagato Sanyal

A Composition Theorem for Randomized Query complexity

Revisions: 1

Let the randomized query complexity of a relation for error probability $\epsilon$ be denoted by $\R_\epsilon(\cdot)$. We prove that for any relation $f \subseteq \{0,1\}^n \times \mathcal{R}$ and Boolean function $g:\{0,1\}^m \rightarrow \{0,1\}$, $\R_{1/3}(f\circ g^n) = \Omega(\R_{4/9}(f)\cdot\R_{1/2-1/n^4}(g))$, where $f \circ g^n$ is the relation obtained by composing $f$ and $g$. ... more >>>

TR17-108 | 19th June 2017
Shafi Goldwasser, Guy Rothblum, Yael Tauman Kalai

Delegating Computation: Interactive Proofs for Muggles

Revisions: 1

In this work we study interactive proofs for tractable languages. The (honest) prover should be efficient and run in polynomial time, or in other words a muggle'' (Muggle: In the fiction of J.K. Rowling: a person who possesses no magical powers''; from the Oxford English Dictionary). The verifier should be ... more >>>

TR17-109 | 22nd June 2017
Russell Impagliazzo, Valentine Kabanets, Antonina Kolokolova, Pierre McKenzie, Shadab Romani

Does Looking Inside a Circuit Help?

The Black-Box Hypothesis, introduced by Barak et al. (JACM, 2012), states that any property of boolean functions decided efficiently (e.g., in BPP) with inputs represented by circuits can also be decided efficiently in the black-box setting, where an algorithm is given an oracle access to the input function and an ... more >>>

TR17-110 | 22nd June 2017
Alessandro Chiesa, Peter Manohar, Igor Shinkar

On Axis-Parallel Tests for Tensor Product Codes

Many low-degree tests examine the input function via its restrictions to random hyperplanes of a certain dimension. Examples include the line-vs-line (Arora, Sudan 2003), plane-vs-plane (Raz, Safra 1997), and cube-vs-cube (Bhangale, Dinur, Livni 2017) tests.

In this paper we study a test introduced by Ben-Sasson and Sudan in 2006 that ... more >>>

TR17-111 | 2nd June 2017
Roksana Baleshzar, Deeparnab Chakrabarty, Ramesh Krishnan S. Pallavoor, Sofya Raskhodnikova, C. Seshadhri

A Lower Bound for Nonadaptive, One-Sided Error Testing of Unateness of Boolean Functions over the Hypercube

A Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^d \to \{0,1\}$ is unate if, along each coordinate, the function is either nondecreasing or nonincreasing. In this note, we prove that any nonadaptive, one-sided error unateness tester must make $\Omega(\frac{d}{\log d})$ queries. This result improves upon the $\Omega(\frac{d}{\log^2 d})$ lower bound for the same class of ... more >>>

TR17-112 | 27th June 2017
Yehuda Lindell

How To Simulate It -- A Tutorial on the Simulation Proof Technique

One of the most fundamental notions of cryptography is that of \emph{simulation}. It stands behind the concepts of semantic security, zero knowledge, and security for multiparty computation. However, writing a simulator and proving security via the use of simulation is a non-trivial task, and one that many newcomers to the ... more >>>

TR17-113 | 1st July 2017
Andrej Bogdanov, Alon Rosen

In 1984, Goldreich, Goldwasser and Micali formalized the concept of pseudorandom functions and proposed a construction based on any length-doubling pseudorandom generator. Since then, pseudorandom functions have turned out to be an extremely influential abstraction, with applications ranging from message authentication to barriers in proving computational complexity lower bounds.

In ... more >>>

TR17-114 | 1st July 2017
Maciej Li\'skiewicz, Matthias Lutter, Rüdiger Reischuk

Proper Learning of k-term DNF Formulas from Satisfying Assignments

In certain applications there may only be positive samples available to
to learn concepts of a class of interest,
and this has to be done properly, i.e. the
hypothesis space has to coincide with the concept class,
and without false positives, i.e. the hypothesis always has be a subset ... more >>>

TR17-115 | 5th July 2017
Arnab Bhattacharyya, Suprovat Ghoshal, Rishi Saket

Hardness of learning noisy halfspaces using polynomial thresholds

We prove the hardness of weakly learning halfspaces in the presence of adversarial noise using polynomial threshold functions (PTFs). In particular, we prove that for any constants $d \in \mathbb{Z}^+$ and $\epsilon > 0$, it is NP-hard to decide: given a set of $\{-1,1\}$-labeled points in $\mathbb{R}^n$ whether (YES Case) ... more >>>

TR17-116 | 5th July 2017
Michal Moshkovitz, Dana Moshkovitz

Mixing Implies Strong Lower Bounds for Space Bounded Learning

With any hypothesis class one can associate a bipartite graph whose vertices are the hypotheses H on one side and all possible labeled examples X on the other side, and an hypothesis is connected to all the labeled examples that are consistent with it. We call this graph the hypotheses ... more >>>

TR17-117 | 20th July 2017
Dmitry Itsykson, Alexander Knop

Hard satisfiable formulas for splittings by linear combinations

Itsykson and Sokolov in 2014 introduced the class of DPLL($\oplus$) algorithms that solve Boolean satisfiability problem using the splitting by linear combinations of variables modulo 2. This class extends the class of DPLL algorithms that split by variables. DPLL($\oplus$) algorithms solve in polynomial time systems of linear equations modulo two ... more >>>

TR17-118 | 20th July 2017
Xiaotie Deng, Zhe Feng, Rucha Kulkarni

Octahedral Tucker is PPA-Complete

Revisions: 1

The Octahedral Tucker problem considers an n-dimensional hypergrid of side length two, centered at the origin, triangulated by connecting the origin to all outside vertices (applied recursively on each of the lower dimensional hypergrids passing through their origins at the corresponding reduced dimensions). Each vertex is assigned a color in ... more >>>

TR17-119 | 25th July 2017

Resource-Efficient Common Randomness and Secret-Key Schemes

We study common randomness where two parties have access to i.i.d. samples from a known random source, and wish to generate a shared random key using limited (or no) communication with the largest possible probability of agreement. This problem is at the core of secret key generation in cryptography, with ... more >>>

TR17-120 | 31st July 2017
Paul Beame, Shayan Oveis Gharan, Xin Yang

Time-Space Tradeoffs for Learning from Small Test Spaces: Learning Low Degree Polynomial Functions

Revisions: 1

We develop an extension of recently developed methods for obtaining time-space tradeoff lower bounds for problems of learning from random test samples to handle the situation where the space of tests is signficantly smaller than the space of inputs, a class of learning problems that is not handled by prior ... more >>>

TR17-121 | 31st July 2017
Sumegha Garg, Ran Raz, Avishay Tal

Extractor-Based Time-Space Lower Bounds for Learning

Revisions: 1

A matrix $M: A \times X \rightarrow \{-1,1\}$ corresponds to the following learning problem: An unknown element $x \in X$ is chosen uniformly at random. A learner tries to learn $x$ from a stream of samples, $(a_1, b_1), (a_2, b_2) \ldots$, where for every $i$, $a_i \in A$ is chosen ... more >>>

TR17-122 | 28th July 2017
Rohit Gurjar, Ben Lee Volk

Pseudorandom Bits for Oblivious Branching Programs

We construct a pseudorandom generator which fools read-$k$ oblivious branching programs and, more generally, any linear length oblivious branching program, assuming that the sequence according to which the bits are read is known in advance. For polynomial width branching programs, the seed lengths in our constructions are $\tilde{O}(n^{1-1/2^{k-1}})$ (for the ... more >>>

TR17-123 | 2nd August 2017
Dmitry Gavinsky, Rahul Jain, Hartmut Klauck, Srijita Kundu, Troy Lee, Miklos Santha, Swagato Sanyal, Jevgenijs Vihrovs

Quadratically Tight Relations for Randomized Query Complexity

Let $f:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ be a Boolean function. The certificate complexity $C(f)$ is a complexity measure that is quadratically tight for the zero-error randomized query complexity $R_0(f)$: $C(f) \leq R_0(f) \leq C(f)^2$. In this paper we study a new complexity measure that we call expectational certificate complexity $EC(f)$, which is ... more >>>

TR17-124 | 6th August 2017
Mrinal Kumar, Ben Lee Volk

An Almost Quadratic Lower Bound for Syntactically Multilinear Arithmetic Circuits

Revisions: 2

We prove a lower bound of $\Omega(n^2/\log^2 n)$ on the size of any syntactically multilinear arithmetic circuit computing some explicit multilinear polynomial $f(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$. Our approach expands and improves upon a result of Raz, Shpilka and Yehudayoff [RSY08], who proved a lower bound of $\Omega(n^{4/3}/\log^2 n)$ for the same ... more >>>

TR17-125 | 7th August 2017

Dimension Reduction for Polynomials over Gaussian Space and Applications

In this work we introduce a new technique for reducing the dimension of the ambient space of low-degree polynomials in the Gaussian space while preserving their relative correlation structure. As applications, we address the following problems:

(I) Computability of the Approximately Optimal Noise Stable function over Gaussian space:

The goal ... more >>>

TR17-126 | 7th August 2017
Swastik Kopparty, Shubhangi Saraf

Local Testing and Decoding of High-Rate Error-Correcting Codes

We survey the state of the art in constructions of locally testable
codes, locally decodable codes and locally correctable codes of high rate.

more >>>

TR17-127 | 12th August 2017
Rohit Gurjar, Thomas Thierauf, Nisheeth Vishnoi

Isolating a Vertex via Lattices: Polytopes with Totally Unimodular Faces

Revisions: 1

We deterministically construct quasi-polynomial weights in quasi-polynomial time, such that in a given polytope with totally unimodular constraints, one vertex is isolated, i.e., there is a unique minimum weight vertex.
More precisely,
the property that we need is that every face of the polytope lies in an affine space defined ... more >>>

TR17-128 | 15th August 2017
Or Meir

The Direct Sum of Universal Relations

The universal relation is the communication problem in which Alice and Bob get as inputs two distinct strings, and they are required to find a coordinate on which the strings differ. The study of this problem is motivated by its connection to Karchmer-Wigderson relations, which are communication problems that are ... more >>>

TR17-129 | 27th August 2017
Or Meir

An Efficient Randomized Protocol for every Karchmer-Wigderson Relation with Two Rounds

Revisions: 8

One of the important challenges in circuit complexity is proving strong
lower bounds for constant-depth circuits. One possible approach to
this problem is to use the framework of Karchmer-Wigderson relations:
Karchmer and Wigderson (SIDMA 3(2), 1990) observed that for every Boolean
function $f$ there is a corresponding communication problem $\mathrm{KW}_{f}$,
more >>>

TR17-130 | 30th August 2017
Oded Goldreich, Guy Rothblum

Worst-case to Average-case reductions for subclasses of P

Revisions: 2

For every polynomial $q$, we present worst-case to average-case (almost-linear-time) reductions for a class of problems in $\cal P$ that are widely conjectured not to be solvable in time $q$.
These classes contain, for example, the problems of counting the number of $k$-cliques in a graph, for any fixed $k\geq3$.
more >>>

TR17-131 | 1st September 2017
Joshua Grochow, Cris Moore

Designing Strassen's algorithm

In 1969, Strassen shocked the world by showing that two n x n matrices could be multiplied in time asymptotically less than $O(n^3)$. While the recursive construction in his algorithm is very clear, the key gain was made by showing that 2 x 2 matrix multiplication could be performed with ... more >>>

TR17-132 | 7th September 2017
Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel Kane, Alistair Stewart

Sharp Bounds for Generalized Uniformity Testing

We study the problem of {\em generalized uniformity testing}~\cite{BC17} of a discrete probability distribution: Given samples from a probability distribution $p$ over an {\em unknown} discrete domain $\mathbf{\Omega}$, we want to distinguish, with probability at least $2/3$, between the case that $p$ is uniform on some {\em subset} of $\mathbf{\Omega}$ ... more >>>

TR17-133 | 7th September 2017
Ilias Diakonikolas, Themis Gouleakis, John Peebles, Eric Price

Sample-Optimal Identity Testing with High Probability

We study the problem of testing identity against a given distribution (a.k.a. goodness-of-fit) with a focus on the high confidence regime. More precisely, given samples from an unknown distribution $p$ over $n$ elements, an explicitly given distribution $q$, and parameters $0< \epsilon, \delta < 1$, we wish to distinguish, {\em ... more >>>

TR17-134 | 8th September 2017
Eli Ben-Sasson, Iddo Bentov, Ynon Horesh, Michael Riabzev

Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proofs of Proximity

Revisions: 2

The family of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes plays a prominent role in the construction of quasilinear probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs) and interactive oracle proofs (IOPs) with perfect zero knowledge and polylogarithmic verifiers. The large concrete computational complexity required to prove membership in RS codes is one of the biggest obstacles to ... more >>>

TR17-135 | 10th September 2017

Quasi-polynomial Hitting Sets for Circuits with Restricted Parse Trees

Revisions: 1

We study the class of non-commutative Unambiguous circuits or Unique-Parse-Tree (UPT) circuits, and a related model of Few-Parse-Trees (FewPT) circuits (which were recently introduced by Lagarde, Malod and Perifel [LMP16] and Lagarde, Limaye and Srinivasan [LLS17]) and give the following constructions:
• An explicit hitting set of quasipolynomial size for ... more >>>

TR17-136 | 10th September 2017
Salman Beigi, Andrej Bogdanov, Omid Etesami, Siyao Guo

Complete Classi fication of Generalized Santha-Vazirani Sources

Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a finite alphabet and $\mathcal{D}$ be a finite set of distributions over $\mathcal{F}$. A Generalized Santha-Vazirani (GSV) source of type $(\mathcal{F}, \mathcal{D})$, introduced by Beigi, Etesami and Gohari (ICALP 2015, SICOMP 2017), is a random sequence $(F_1, \dots, F_n)$ in $\mathcal{F}^n$, where $F_i$ is a sample from ... more >>>

TR17-137 | 11th September 2017
Olaf Beyersdorff, Joshua Blinkhorn, Luke Hinde

Size, Cost, and Capacity: A Semantic Technique for Hard Random QBFs

As a natural extension of the SAT problem, different proof systems for quantified Boolean formulas (QBF) have been proposed. Many of these extend a propositional system to handle universal quantifiers.

By formalising the construction of the QBF proof system from a propositional proof system, by the addition of the ... more >>>

TR17-138 | 17th September 2017

Local decoding and testing of polynomials over grids

The well-known DeMillo-Lipton-Schwartz-Zippel lemma says that $n$-variate
polynomials of total degree at most $d$ over
grids, i.e. sets of the form $A_1 \times A_2 \times \cdots \times A_n$, form
error-correcting codes (of distance at least $2^{-d}$ provided $\min_i\{|A_i|\}\geq 2$).
In this work we explore their local
decodability and local testability. ... more >>>

TR17-139 | 18th September 2017
Thomas Watson

A ZPP^NP[1] Lifting Theorem

The complexity class ZPP^NP[1] (corresponding to zero-error randomized algorithms with access to one NP oracle query) is known to have a number of curious properties. We further explore this class in the settings of time complexity, query complexity, and communication complexity.

For starters, we provide a new characterization: ZPP^NP[1] equals ... more >>>

TR17-140 | 11th September 2017
Tong Qin, Osamu Watanabe

An improvement of the algorithm of Hertli for the unique 3SAT problem

We propose a simple idea for improving the randomized algorithm of Hertli for the Unique 3SAT problem.

more >>>

TR17-141 | 19th September 2017
Joshua Brakensiek, Venkatesan Guruswami

A Family of Dictatorship Tests with Perfect Completeness for 2-to-2 Label Cover

We give a family of dictatorship tests with perfect completeness and low-soundness for 2-to-2 constraints. The associated 2-to-2 conjecture has been the basis of some previous inapproximability results with perfect completeness. However, evidence towards the conjecture in the form of integrality gaps even against weak semidefinite programs has been elusive. ... more >>>

TR17-142 | 21st September 2017

On small-depth Frege proofs for Tseitin for grids

We prove that a small-depth Frege refutation of the Tseitin contradiction
on the grid requires subexponential size.
We conclude that polynomial size Frege refutations
of the Tseitin contradiction must use formulas of almost
logarithmic depth.

more >>>

TR17-143 | 26th September 2017
Tom Gur, Govind Ramnarayan, Ron Rothblum

Relaxed Locally Correctable Codes

Revisions: 1

Locally decodable codes (LDCs) and locally correctable codes (LCCs) are error-correcting codes in which individual bits of the message and codeword, respectively, can be recovered by querying only few bits from a noisy codeword. These codes have found numerous applications both in theory and in practice.

A natural relaxation of ... more >>>

TR17-144 | 27th September 2017
Moritz Müller, Ján Pich

Feasibly constructive proofs of succinct weak circuit lower bounds

We ask for feasibly constructive proofs of known circuit lower bounds for explicit functions on bit strings of length $n$. In 1995 Razborov showed that many can be proved in Cook’s theory $PV_1$, a bounded arithmetic formalizing polynomial time reasoning. He formalized circuit lower bound statements for small $n$ of ... more >>>

TR17-145 | 19th September 2017
Roei Tell

Quantified derandomization of linear threshold circuits

Revisions: 2

One of the prominent current challenges in complexity theory is the attempt to prove lower bounds for $TC^0$, the class of constant-depth, polynomial-size circuits with majority gates. Relying on the results of Williams (2013), an appealing approach to prove such lower bounds is to construct a non-trivial derandomization algorithm for ... more >>>

TR17-146 | 1st October 2017
Or Meir

On Derandomized Composition of Boolean Functions

Revisions: 2

The composition of two Boolean functions $f:\left\{0,1\right\}^{m}\to\left\{0,1\right\}$, $g:\left\{0,1\right\}^{n}\to\left\{0,1\right\}$
is the function $f \diamond g$ that takes as inputs $m$ strings $x_{1},\ldots,x_{m}\in\left\{0,1\right\}^{n}$
and computes
$(f \diamond g)(x_{1},\ldots,x_{m})=f\left(g(x_{1}),\ldots,g(x_{m})\right).$
This operation has been used several times for amplifying different
hardness measures of $f$ and $g$. This comes at a cost: the ... more >>>

TR17-147 | 3rd October 2017
Venkatesan Guruswami, Rishi Saket

Hardness of Rainbow Coloring Hypergraphs

A hypergraph is $k$-rainbow colorable if there exists a vertex coloring using $k$ colors such that each hyperedge has all the $k$ colors. Unlike usual hypergraph coloring, rainbow coloring becomes harder as the number of colors increases. This work studies the rainbow colorability of hypergraphs which are guaranteed to be ... more >>>

TR17-148 | 6th October 2017
Or Meir, Avishay Tal

The Choice and Agreement Problems of a Random Function

Revisions: 3

The direct-sum question is a classical question that asks whether
performing a task on $m$ independent inputs is $m$ times harder
than performing it on a single input. In order to study this question,
Beimel et. al (Computational Complexity 23(1), 2014) introduced the following related problems:

* The choice ... more >>>

TR17-149 | 7th October 2017
Or Meir, Avi Wigderson

Prediction from Partial Information and Hindsight, with Application to Circuit Lower Bounds

Revisions: 3

Consider a random sequence of $n$ bits that has entropy at least $n-k$, where $k\ll n$. A commonly used observation is that an average coordinate of this random sequence is close to being uniformly distributed, that is, the coordinate “looks random”. In this work, we prove a stronger result that ... more >>>

TR17-150 | 26th September 2017
Andris Ambainis, Martins Kokainis, Krisjanis Prusis, Jevgenijs Vihrovs

All Classical Adversary Methods are Equivalent for Total Functions

We show that all known classical adversary lower bounds on randomized query complexity are equivalent for total functions, and are equal to the fractional block sensitivity $\text{fbs}(f)$. That includes the Kolmogorov complexity bound of Laplante and Magniez and the earlier relational adversary bound of Aaronson. For partial functions, we show ... more >>>

TR17-151 | 8th October 2017
Paul Beame, Noah Fleming, Russell Impagliazzo, Antonina Kolokolova, Denis Pankratov, Toniann Pitassi, Robert Robere

Stabbing Planes

We introduce and develop a new semi-algebraic proof system, called Stabbing Planes that is in the style of DPLL-based modern SAT solvers. As with DPLL, there is only one rule: the current polytope can be subdivided by
branching on an inequality and its "integer negation.'' That is, we can (nondeterministically ... more >>>

TR17-152 | 9th October 2017
Swagato Sanyal

One-way Communication and Non-adaptive Decision Tree

Let $f$ be a Boolean function on $n$-bits, and $\mathsf{IP}$ the inner-product function on $2b$ bits. Let $f^{\mathsf{IP}}:=f \circ \mathsf{IP}^n$ be the two party function obtained by composing $f$ with $\mathsf{IP}$. In this work we bound the one-way communication complexity of $f^{\IP}$ in terms of the non-adaptive query complexity of ... more >>>

TR17-153 | 9th October 2017
Pranjal Dutta, Nitin Saxena, Amit Sinhababu

Discovering the roots: Uniform closure results for algebraic classes under factoring

Newton iteration (NI) is an almost 350 years old recursive formula that approximates a simple root of a polynomial quite rapidly. We generalize it to a matrix recurrence (allRootsNI) that approximates all the roots simultaneously. In this form, the process yields a better circuit complexity in the case when the ... more >>>

TR17-154 | 12th October 2017
Christoph Berkholz

The Relation between Polynomial Calculus, Sherali-Adams, and Sum-of-Squares Proofs

We relate different approaches for proving the unsatisfiability of a system of real polynomial equations over Boolean variables. On the one hand, there are the static proof systems Sherali-Adams and sum-of-squares (a.k.a. Lasserre), which are based on linear and semi-definite programming relaxations. On the other hand, we consider polynomial calculus, ... more >>>

TR17-155 | 13th October 2017
Alessandro Chiesa, Tom Gur

Proofs of Proximity for Distribution Testing

Revisions: 1

Distribution testing is an area of property testing that studies algorithms that receive few samples from a probability distribution D and decide whether D has a certain property or is far (in total variation distance) from all distributions with that property. Most natural properties of distributions, however, require a large ... more >>>

TR17-156 | 15th October 2017
Suryajith Chillara, Nutan Limaye, Srikanth Srinivasan

Small-depth Multilinear Formula Lower Bounds for Iterated Matrix Multiplication, with Applications

The complexity of Iterated Matrix Multiplication is a central theme in Computational Complexity theory, as the problem is closely related to the problem of separating various complexity classes within $\mathrm{P}$. In this paper, we study the algebraic formula complexity of multiplying $d$ many $2\times 2$ matrices, denoted $\mathrm{IMM}_{d}$, and show ... more >>>

TR17-157 | 13th October 2017
Monaldo Mastrolilli

High Degree Sum of Squares Proofs, Bienstock-Zuckerberg hierarchy and Chvatal-Gomory cuts

Revisions: 1

Chvatal-Gomory (CG) cuts and the Bienstock-Zuckerberg hierarchy capture useful linear programs that the standard bounded degree Lasserre/Sum-of-Squares (SOS) hierarchy fails to capture.

In this paper we present a novel polynomial time SOS hierarchy for 0/1 problems with a custom subspace of high degree polynomials (not the standard subspace of low-degree ... more >>>

TR17-158 | 23rd October 2017
Eric Allender, Joshua Grochow, Dieter van Melkebeek, Cris Moore, Andrew Morgan

Minimum Circuit Size, Graph Isomorphism, and Related Problems

We study the computational power of deciding whether a given truth-table can be described by a circuit of a given size (the Minimum Circuit Size Problem, or MCSP for short), and of the variant denoted as MKTP where circuit size is replaced by a polynomially-related Kolmogorov measure. All prior reductions ... more >>>

TR17-159 | 28th October 2017

A $o(d) \cdot \text{polylog}~n$ Monotonicity Tester for Boolean Functions over the Hypergrid $[n]^d$

We study monotonicity testing of Boolean functions over the hypergrid $[n]^d$ and design a non-adaptive tester with $1$-sided error whose query complexity is $\tilde{O}(d^{5/6})\cdot \text{poly}(\log n,1/\epsilon)$. Previous to our work, the best known testers had query complexity linear in $d$ but independent of $n$. We improve upon these testers as ... more >>>

TR17-160 | 29th October 2017
Eli Ben-Sasson, Eden Saig

Collaborative Discovery: A study of Guru-follower dynamics

Revisions: 1

Gurus are individuals who claim to possess mental powers of insight and prediction that far surpass those of the average person; they compete over followers, offering them insight in return for continued devotion. Followers wish to harness a (true) Guru’s predictive power but (i) have limited attention span and (ii) ... more >>>

TR17-161 | 30th October 2017
Mark Braverman, Gil Cohen, Sumegha Garg

Hitting Sets with Near-Optimal Error for Read-Once Branching Programs

Nisan (Combinatorica'92) constructed a pseudorandom generator for length $n$, width $n$ read-once branching programs (ROBPs) with error $\varepsilon$ and seed length $O(\log^2{n} + \log{n} \cdot \log(1/\varepsilon))$. A major goal in complexity theory is to reduce the seed length, hopefully, to the optimal $O(\log{n}+\log(1/\varepsilon))$, or to construct improved hitting sets, as ... more >>>

TR17-162 | 26th October 2017
Klim Efremenko, Ankit Garg, Rafael Mendes de Oliveira, Avi Wigderson

Barriers for Rank Methods in Arithmetic Complexity

Arithmetic complexity, the study of the cost of computing polynomials via additions and multiplications, is considered (for many good reasons) simpler to understand than Boolean complexity, namely computing Boolean functions via logical gates. And indeed, we seem to have significantly more lower bound techniques and results in arithmetic complexity than ... more >>>

TR17-163 | 2nd November 2017
Michael Forbes, Amir Shpilka

A PSPACE Construction of a Hitting Set for the Closure of Small Algebraic Circuits

In this paper we study the complexity of constructing a hitting set for $\overline{VP}$, the class of polynomials that can be infinitesimally approximated by polynomials that are computed by polynomial sized algebraic circuits, over the real or complex numbers. Specifically, we show that there is a PSPACE algorithm that given ... more >>>

TR17-164 | 3rd November 2017
Scott Aaronson

We introduce the problem of *shadow tomography*: given an unknown $D$-dimensional quantum mixed state $\rho$, as well as known two-outcome measurements $E_{1},\ldots,E_{M}$, estimate the probability that $E_{i}$ accepts $\rho$, to within additive error $\varepsilon$, for each of the $M$ measurements. How many copies of $\rho$ are needed to achieve this, ... more >>>

TR17-165 | 3rd November 2017
Toniann Pitassi, Robert Robere

Lifting Nullstellensatz to Monotone Span Programs over Any Field

We characterize the size of monotone span programs computing certain "structured" boolean functions by the Nullstellensatz degree of a related unsatisfiable Boolean formula.

This yields the first exponential lower bounds for monotone span programs over arbitrary fields, the first exponential separations between monotone span programs over fields of different ... more >>>

TR17-166 | 3rd November 2017
Emanuele Viola

A sampling lower bound for permutations

A map $f:[n]^{\ell}\to[n]^{n}$ has locality $d$ if each output symbol
in $[n]=\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ depends only on $d$ of the $\ell$ input
symbols in $[n]$. We show that the output distribution of a $d$-local
map has statistical distance at least $1-2\cdot\exp(-n/\log^{c^{d}}n)$
from a uniform permutation of $[n]$. This seems to be the ... more >>>

TR17-167 | 3rd November 2017
Chin Ho Lee, Emanuele Viola

More on bounded independence plus noise: Pseudorandom generators for read-once polynomials

Revisions: 1

We construct pseudorandom generators with improved seed length for
several classes of tests. First we consider the class of read-once
polynomials over GF(2) in $m$ variables. For error $\e$ we obtain seed
length $\tilde O (\log(m/\e)) \log(1/\e)$, where $\tilde O$ hides lower-order
terms. This is optimal up to the factor ... more >>>

TR17-168 | 5th November 2017
Amos Beimel, Iftach Haitner, Nikolaos Makriyannis, Eran Omri

Tighter Bounds on Multi-Party Coin Flipping, via Augmented Weak Martingales and Di erentially Private Sampling

Revisions: 6

In his seminal work, Cleve [STOC 1986] has proved that any r-round coin-flipping protocol can be efficiently biassed by ?(1/r). The above lower bound was met for the two-party case by Moran, Naor, and Segev [Journal of Cryptology '16], and the three-party case (up to a polylog factor) by Haitner ... more >>>

TR17-169 | 24th October 2017
Mark Bun, Robin Kothari, Justin Thaler

The Polynomial Method Strikes Back: Tight Quantum Query Bounds via Dual Polynomials

The approximate degree of a Boolean function $f$ is the least degree of a real polynomial that approximates $f$ pointwise to error at most $1/3$. The approximate degree of $f$ is known to be a lower bound on the quantum query complexity of $f$ (Beals et al., FOCS 1998 and ... more >>>

TR17-170 | 6th November 2017

Simulation Beats Richness: New Data-Structure Lower Bounds

We develop a technique for proving lower bounds in the setting of asymmetric communication, a model that was introduced in the famous works of Miltersen (STOC'94) and Miltersen, Nisan, Safra and Wigderson (STOC'95). At the core of our technique is a novel simulation theorem: Alice gets a $p \times n$ ... more >>>

TR17-171 | 6th November 2017
Eshan Chattopadhyay, Pooya Hatami, Omer Reingold, Avishay Tal

Improved Pseudorandomness for Unordered Branching Programs through Local Monotonicity

Revisions: 1

We present an explicit pseudorandom generator with seed length $\tilde{O}((\log n)^{w+1})$ for read-once, oblivious, width $w$ branching programs that can read their input bits in any order. This improves upon the work of Impaggliazzo, Meka and Zuckerman (FOCS'12) where they required seed length $n^{1/2+o(1)}$.

A central ingredient in our work ... more >>>

TR17-172 | 3rd November 2017
Itay Berman, Akshay Degwekar, Ron Rothblum, Prashant Nalini Vasudevan

From Laconic Zero-Knowledge to Public-Key Cryptography

Since its inception, public-key encryption (PKE) has been one of the main cornerstones of cryptography. A central goal in cryptographic research is to understand the foundations of public-key encryption and in particular, base its existence on a natural and generic complexity-theoretic assumption. An intriguing candidate for such an assumption is ... more >>>

TR17-173 | 6th November 2017
Igor Carboni Oliveira, Ruiwen Chen, Rahul Santhanam

An Average-Case Lower Bound against ACC^0

In a seminal work, Williams [Wil14] showed that NEXP (non-deterministic exponential time) does not have polynomial-size ACC^0 circuits. Williams' technique inherently gives a worst-case lower bound, and until now, no average-case version of his result was known.

We show that there is a language L in NEXP (resp. EXP^NP) ... more >>>

TR17-174 | 13th November 2017
Christian Engels, Mohit Garg, Kazuhisa Makino, Anup Rao

On Expressing Majority as a Majority of Majorities

If $k<n$, can one express the majority of $n$ bits as the majority of at most $k$ majorities, each of at most $k$ bits? We prove that such an expression is possible only if $k = \Omega(n^{4/5})$. This improves on a bound proved by Kulikov and Podolskii, who showed that ... more >>>

TR17-175 | 13th November 2017
Ankit Garg, Mika Göös, Pritish Kamath, Dmitry Sokolov

Monotone Circuit Lower Bounds from Resolution

For any unsatisfiable CNF formula $F$ that is hard to refute in the Resolution proof system, we show that a gadget-composed version of $F$ is hard to refute in any proof system whose lines are computed by efficient communication protocols---or, equivalently, that a monotone function associated with $F$ has large ... more >>>

TR17-176 | 15th November 2017

Exponential Separation between Quantum and Classical Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams, Reordering Method and Hierarchies

In this paper, we study quantum OBDD model, it is a restricted version of read-once quantum branching programs, with respect to "width" complexity. It is known that the maximal gap between deterministic and quantum complexities is exponential. But there are few examples of functions with such a gap. We present ... more >>>

TR17-177 | 16th November 2017
Daniel Kane, Roi Livni, Shay Moran, Amir Yehudayoff

On Communication Complexity of Classification Problems

Revisions: 1

This work introduces a model of distributed learning in the spirit of Yao's communication complexity model. We consider a two-party setting, where each of the players gets a list of labelled examples and they communicate in order to jointly perform some learning task. To naturally fit into the framework of ... more >>>

TR17-178 | 24th November 2017
Justin Holmgren, Lisa Yang

(A Counterexample to) Parallel Repetition for Non-Signaling Multi-Player Games

We give a three-player game whose non-signaling value is constant (2/3) under any number of parallel repetitions. This is the first known setting where parallel repetition completely fails to reduce the maximum winning probability of computationally unbounded players.

We also show that the best known results on non-signaling ... more >>>

TR17-179 | 20th November 2017
Alexander Knop

IPS-like Proof Systems Based on Binary Decision Diagrams

It is well-known that there is equivalence between ordered resolution and ordered binary decision diagrams (OBDD) [LNNW95]; i.e., for any unsatisfiable formula ?, the size of the smallest ordered resolution refutation of ? equal to the size of the smallest OBDD for the canonical search problem corresponding to ?. But ... more >>>

TR17-180 | 26th November 2017
Irit Dinur, Yuval Filmus, Prahladh Harsha

Low degree almost Boolean functions are sparse juntas

Nisan and Szegedy showed that low degree Boolean functions are juntas. Kindler and Safra showed that low degree functions which are *almost* Boolean are close to juntas. Their result holds with respect to $\mu_p$ for every *constant* $p$. When $p$ is allowed to be very small, new phenomena emerge. ... more >>>

TR17-181 | 26th November 2017
Irit Dinur, Yuval Filmus, Prahladh Harsha

Agreement tests on graphs and hypergraphs

Agreement tests are a generalization of low degree tests that capture a local-to-global phenomenon, which forms the combinatorial backbone of most PCP constructions. In an agreement test, a function is given by an ensemble of local restrictions. The agreement test checks that the restrictions agree when they overlap, and the ... more >>>

TR17-182 | 21st November 2017
Mark Braverman, Young Kun Ko

Information Value of Two-Prover Games

We introduce a generalization of the standard framework for studying the difficulty of two-prover games. Specifically, we study the model where Alice and Bob are allowed to communicate (with information constraints) --- in contrast to the usual two-prover game where they are not allowed to communicate after receiving their respective ... more >>>

TR17-183 | 28th November 2017
Sivakanth Gopi, Venkatesan Guruswami, Sergey Yekhanin

On Maximally Recoverable Local Reconstruction Codes

In recent years the explosion in the volumes of data being stored online has resulted in distributed storage systems transitioning to erasure coding based schemes. Local Reconstruction Codes (LRCs) have emerged as the codes of choice for these applications. An $(n,r,h,a,q)$-LRC is a $q$-ary code, where encoding is as a ... more >>>

TR17-184 | 29th November 2017

Inner Product and Set Disjointness: Beyond Logarithmically Many Parties

A basic goal in complexity theory is to understand the communication complexity of number-on-the-forehead problems $f\colon(\{0,1\}^n)^{k}\to\{0,1\}$ with $k\gg\log n$ parties. We study the problems of inner product and set disjointness and determine their randomized communication complexity for every $k\geq\log n$, showing in both cases that $\Theta(1+\lceil\log n\rceil/\log\lceil1+k/\log n\rceil)$ bits are ... more >>>

TR17-185 | 28th November 2017
Makrand Sinha

Lower Bounds for Approximating the Matching Polytope

We prove that any extended formulation that approximates the matching polytope on $n$-vertex graphs up to a factor of $(1+\varepsilon)$ for any $\frac2n \le \varepsilon \le 1$ must have at least ${n}\choose{{\alpha}/{\varepsilon}}$ defining inequalities where $0<\alpha<1$ is an absolute constant. This is tight as exhibited by the $(1+\varepsilon)$ approximating linear ... more >>>

TR17-186 | 29th November 2017
Karthik C. S., Bundit Laekhanukit, Pasin Manurangsi

On the Parameterized Complexity of Approximating Dominating Set

Revisions: 1

We study the parameterized complexity of approximating the $k$-Dominating Set (domset) problem where an integer $k$ and a graph $G$ on $n$ vertices are given as input, and the goal is to find a dominating set of size at most $F(k) \cdot k$ whenever the graph $G$ has a dominating ... more >>>

TR17-187 | 3rd December 2017
Roei Tell

A Note on the Limitations of Two Black-Box Techniques in Quantified Derandomization

The quantified derandomization problem of a circuit class $\mathcal{C}$ with a function $B:\mathbb{N}\rightarrow\mathbb{N}$ is the following: Given an input circuit $C\in\mathcal{C}$ over $n$ bits, deterministically distinguish between the case that $C$ accepts all but $B(n)$ of its inputs and the case that $C$ rejects all but $B(n)$ of its inputs. ... more >>>

TR17-188 | 22nd December 2017
Cody Murray, Ryan Williams

Circuit Lower Bounds for Nondeterministic Quasi-Polytime: An Easy Witness Lemma for NP and NQP

We prove that if every problem in $NP$ has $n^k$-size circuits for a fixed constant $k$, then for every $NP$-verifier and every yes-instance $x$ of length $n$ for that verifier, the verifier's search space has an $n^{O(k^3)}$-size witness circuit: a witness for $x$ that can be encoded with a circuit ... more >>>

TR17-189 | 25th December 2017
Benny Applebaum, Barak Arkis

Conditional Disclosure of Secrets and $d$-Uniform Secret Sharing with Constant Information Rate

Consider the following secret-sharing problem. Your goal is to distribute a long file $s$ between $n$ servers such that $(d-1)$-subsets cannot recover the file, $(d+1)$-subsets can recover the file, and $d$-subsets should be able to recover $s$ if and only if they appear in some predefined list $L$. How small ... more >>>

TR17-190 | 6th November 2017
Anirbit Mukherjee, Amitabh Basu

Lower bounds over Boolean inputs for deep neural networks with ReLU gates.

Motivated by the resurgence of neural networks in being able to solve complex learning tasks we undertake a study of high depth networks using ReLU gates which implement the function $x \mapsto \max\{0,x\}$. We try to understand the role of depth in such neural networks by showing size lowerbounds against ... more >>>

TR17-191 | 15th December 2017
Alexander Smal, Navid Talebanfard

Prediction from Partial Information and Hindsight, an Alternative Proof

Revisions: 2

Let $X$ be a random variable distributed over $n$-bit strings with $H(X) \ge n - k$, where $k \ll n$. Using subadditivity we know that a random coordinate looks random. Meir and Wigderson [TR17-149] showed a random coordinate looks random to an adversary who is allowed to query around $n/k$ ... more >>>

TR17-192 | 15th December 2017
Krishnamoorthy Dinesh, Jayalal Sarma

Alternation, Sparsity and Sensitivity : Bounds and Exponential Gaps

The well-known Sensitivity Conjecture regarding combinatorial complexity measures on Boolean functions states that for any Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$, block sensitivity of $f$ is polynomially related to sensitivity of $f$ (denoted by $\mathbf{sens}(f)$). From the complexity theory side, the XOR Log-Rank Conjecture states that for any Boolean function, \$f:\{0,1\}^n ... more >>>

TR17-193 | 31st December 2017
Oded Goldreich, Avishay Tal

On Constant-Depth Canonical Boolean Circuits for Computing Multilinear Functions

We consider new complexity measures for the model of multilinear circuits with general multilinear gates introduced by Goldreich and Wigderson (ECCC, 2013).
These complexity measures are related to the size of canonical constant-depth Boolean circuits, which extend the definition of canonical depth-three Boolean circuits.
We obtain matching lower and upper ... more >>>

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