9,700 research outputs found
Tighter Relations Between Sensitivity and Other Complexity Measures
Sensitivity conjecture is a longstanding and fundamental open problem in the
area of complexity measures of Boolean functions and decision tree complexity.
The conjecture postulates that the maximum sensitivity of a Boolean function is
polynomially related to other major complexity measures. Despite much attention
to the problem and major advances in analysis of Boolean functions in the past
decade, the problem remains wide open with no positive result toward the
conjecture since the work of Kenyon and Kutin from 2004.
In this work, we present new upper bounds for various complexity measures in
terms of sensitivity improving the bounds provided by Kenyon and Kutin.
Specifically, we show that deg(f)^{1-o(1)}=O(2^{s(f)}) and C(f) < 2^{s(f)-1}
s(f); these in turn imply various corollaries regarding the relation between
sensitivity and other complexity measures, such as block sensitivity, via known
results. The gap between sensitivity and other complexity measures remains
exponential but these results are the first improvement for this difficult
problem that has been achieved in a decade.Comment: This is the merged form of arXiv submission 1306.4466 with another
work. Appeared in ICALP 2014, 14 page
Testing Booleanity and the Uncertainty Principle
Let f:{-1,1}^n -> R be a real function on the hypercube, given by its
discrete Fourier expansion, or, equivalently, represented as a multilinear
polynomial. We say that it is Boolean if its image is in {-1,1}.
We show that every function on the hypercube with a sparse Fourier expansion
must either be Boolean or far from Boolean. In particular, we show that a
multilinear polynomial with at most k terms must either be Boolean, or output
values different than -1 or 1 for a fraction of at least 2/(k+2)^2 of its
domain.
It follows that given oracle access to f, together with the guarantee that
its representation as a multilinear polynomial has at most k terms, one can
test Booleanity using O(k^2) queries. We show an \Omega(k) queries lower bound
for this problem.
Our proof crucially uses Hirschman's entropic version of Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle.Comment: 15 page
Characterization and Lower Bounds for Branching Program Size using Projective Dimension
We study projective dimension, a graph parameter (denoted by pd for a
graph ), introduced by (Pudl\'ak, R\"odl 1992), who showed that proving
lower bounds for pd for bipartite graphs associated with a Boolean
function imply size lower bounds for branching programs computing .
Despite several attempts (Pudl\'ak, R\"odl 1992 ; Babai, R\'{o}nyai, Ganapathy
2000), proving super-linear lower bounds for projective dimension of explicit
families of graphs has remained elusive.
We show that there exist a Boolean function (on bits) for which the
gap between the projective dimension and size of the optimal branching program
computing (denoted by bpsize), is . Motivated by the
argument in (Pudl\'ak, R\"odl 1992), we define two variants of projective
dimension - projective dimension with intersection dimension 1 (denoted by
upd) and bitwise decomposable projective dimension (denoted by
bitpdim).
As our main result, we show that there is an explicit family of graphs on vertices such that the projective dimension is , the
projective dimension with intersection dimension is and the
bitwise decomposable projective dimension is .
We also show that there exist a Boolean function (on bits) for which
the gap between upd and bpsize is . In contrast, we
also show that the bitwise decomposable projective dimension characterizes size
of the branching program up to a polynomial factor. That is, there exists a
constant and for any function , . We also study two other
variants of projective dimension and show that they are exactly equal to
well-studied graph parameters - bipartite clique cover number and bipartite
partition number respectively.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figure
The quantum adversary method and classical formula size lower bounds
We introduce two new complexity measures for Boolean functions, or more
generally for functions of the form f:S->T. We call these measures sumPI and
maxPI. The quantity sumPI has been emerging through a line of research on
quantum query complexity lower bounds via the so-called quantum adversary
method [Amb02, Amb03, BSS03, Zha04, LM04], culminating in [SS04] with the
realization that these many different formulations are in fact equivalent.
Given that sumPI turns out to be such a robust invariant of a function, we
begin to investigate this quantity in its own right and see that it also has
applications to classical complexity theory.
As a surprising application we show that sumPI^2(f) is a lower bound on the
formula size, and even, up to a constant multiplicative factor, the
probabilistic formula size of f. We show that several formula size lower bounds
in the literature, specifically Khrapchenko and its extensions [Khr71, Kou93],
including a key lemma of [Has98], are in fact special cases of our method.
The second quantity we introduce, maxPI(f), is always at least as large as
sumPI(f), and is derived from sumPI in such a way that maxPI^2(f) remains a
lower bound on formula size. While sumPI(f) is always a lower bound on the
quantum query complexity of f, this is not the case in general for maxPI(f). A
strong advantage of sumPI(f) is that it has both primal and dual
characterizations, and thus it is relatively easy to give both upper and lower
bounds on the sumPI complexity of functions. To demonstrate this, we look at a
few concrete examples, for three functions: recursive majority of three, a
function defined by Ambainis, and the collision problem.Comment: Appears in Conference on Computational Complexity 200
Logic Meets Algebra: the Case of Regular Languages
The study of finite automata and regular languages is a privileged meeting
point of algebra and logic. Since the work of Buchi, regular languages have
been classified according to their descriptive complexity, i.e. the type of
logical formalism required to define them. The algebraic point of view on
automata is an essential complement of this classification: by providing
alternative, algebraic characterizations for the classes, it often yields the
only opportunity for the design of algorithms that decide expressibility in
some logical fragment.
We survey the existing results relating the expressibility of regular
languages in logical fragments of MSO[S] with algebraic properties of their
minimal automata. In particular, we show that many of the best known results in
this area share the same underlying mechanics and rely on a very strong
relation between logical substitutions and block-products of pseudovarieties of
monoid. We also explain the impact of these connections on circuit complexity
theory.Comment: 37 page
Some Applications of Coding Theory in Computational Complexity
Error-correcting codes and related combinatorial constructs play an important
role in several recent (and old) results in computational complexity theory. In
this paper we survey results on locally-testable and locally-decodable
error-correcting codes, and their applications to complexity theory and to
cryptography.
Locally decodable codes are error-correcting codes with sub-linear time
error-correcting algorithms. They are related to private information retrieval
(a type of cryptographic protocol), and they are used in average-case
complexity and to construct ``hard-core predicates'' for one-way permutations.
Locally testable codes are error-correcting codes with sub-linear time
error-detection algorithms, and they are the combinatorial core of
probabilistically checkable proofs
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