1,984 research outputs found
Improved Lower Bounds for Testing Triangle-freeness in Boolean Functions via Fast Matrix Multiplication
Understanding the query complexity for testing linear-invariant properties
has been a central open problem in the study of algebraic property testing.
Triangle-freeness in Boolean functions is a simple property whose testing
complexity is unknown. Three Boolean functions , and are said to be triangle free if there is no such that . This property
is known to be strongly testable (Green 2005), but the number of queries needed
is upper-bounded only by a tower of twos whose height is polynomial in 1 /
\epsislon, where \epsislon is the distance between the tested function
triple and triangle-freeness, i.e., the minimum fraction of function values
that need to be modified to make the triple triangle free. A lower bound of for any one-sided tester was given by Bhattacharyya and
Xie (2010). In this work we improve this bound to .
Interestingly, we prove this by way of a combinatorial construction called
\emph{uniquely solvable puzzles} that was at the heart of Coppersmith and
Winograd's renowned matrix multiplication algorithm
Differential Privacy and the Fat-Shattering Dimension of Linear Queries
In this paper, we consider the task of answering linear queries under the
constraint of differential privacy. This is a general and well-studied class of
queries that captures other commonly studied classes, including predicate
queries and histogram queries. We show that the accuracy to which a set of
linear queries can be answered is closely related to its fat-shattering
dimension, a property that characterizes the learnability of real-valued
functions in the agnostic-learning setting.Comment: Appears in APPROX 201
The intersection of two halfspaces has high threshold degree
The threshold degree of a Boolean function f:{0,1}^n->{-1,+1} is the least
degree of a real polynomial p such that f(x)=sgn p(x). We construct two
halfspaces on {0,1}^n whose intersection has threshold degree Theta(sqrt n), an
exponential improvement on previous lower bounds. This solves an open problem
due to Klivans (2002) and rules out the use of perceptron-based techniques for
PAC learning the intersection of two halfspaces, a central unresolved challenge
in computational learning. We also prove that the intersection of two majority
functions has threshold degree Omega(log n), which is tight and settles a
conjecture of O'Donnell and Servedio (2003).
Our proof consists of two parts. First, we show that for any nonconstant
Boolean functions f and g, the intersection f(x)^g(y) has threshold degree O(d)
if and only if ||f-F||_infty + ||g-G||_infty < 1 for some rational functions F,
G of degree O(d). Second, we settle the least degree required for approximating
a halfspace and a majority function to any given accuracy by rational
functions.
Our technique further allows us to make progress on Aaronson's challenge
(2008) and contribute strong direct product theorems for polynomial
representations of composed Boolean functions of the form F(f_1,...,f_n). In
particular, we give an improved lower bound on the approximate degree of the
AND-OR tree.Comment: Full version of the FOCS'09 pape
Extended Formulation Lower Bounds via Hypergraph Coloring?
Exploring the power of linear programming for combinatorial optimization
problems has been recently receiving renewed attention after a series of
breakthrough impossibility results. From an algorithmic perspective, the
related questions concern whether there are compact formulations even for
problems that are known to admit polynomial-time algorithms.
We propose a framework for proving lower bounds on the size of extended
formulations. We do so by introducing a specific type of extended relaxations
that we call product relaxations and is motivated by the study of the
Sherali-Adams (SA) hierarchy. Then we show that for every approximate
relaxation of a polytope P, there is a product relaxation that has the same
size and is at least as strong. We provide a methodology for proving lower
bounds on the size of approximate product relaxations by lower bounding the
chromatic number of an underlying hypergraph, whose vertices correspond to
gap-inducing vectors.
We extend the definition of product relaxations and our methodology to mixed
integer sets. However in this case we are able to show that mixed product
relaxations are at least as powerful as a special family of extended
formulations. As an application of our method we show an exponential lower
bound on the size of approximate mixed product formulations for the metric
capacitated facility location problem, a problem which seems to be intractable
for linear programming as far as constant-gap compact formulations are
concerned
Improved Bounds on Quantum Learning Algorithms
In this article we give several new results on the complexity of algorithms
that learn Boolean functions from quantum queries and quantum examples.
Hunziker et al. conjectured that for any class C of Boolean functions, the
number of quantum black-box queries which are required to exactly identify an
unknown function from C is ,
where is a combinatorial parameter of the class C. We
essentially resolve this conjecture in the affirmative by giving a quantum
algorithm that, for any class C, identifies any unknown function from C using
quantum black-box
queries.
We consider a range of natural problems intermediate between the exact
learning problem (in which the learner must obtain all bits of information
about the black-box function) and the usual problem of computing a predicate
(in which the learner must obtain only one bit of information about the
black-box function). We give positive and negative results on when the quantum
and classical query complexities of these intermediate problems are
polynomially related to each other.
Finally, we improve the known lower bounds on the number of quantum examples
(as opposed to quantum black-box queries) required for -PAC
learning any concept class of Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension d over the domain
from to . This new lower bound comes
closer to matching known upper bounds for classical PAC learning.Comment: Minor corrections. 18 pages. To appear in Quantum Information
Processing. Requires: algorithm.sty, algorithmic.sty to buil
A Nearly Optimal Lower Bound on the Approximate Degree of AC
The approximate degree of a Boolean function is the least degree of a real polynomial that
approximates pointwise to error at most . We introduce a generic
method for increasing the approximate degree of a given function, while
preserving its computability by constant-depth circuits.
Specifically, we show how to transform any Boolean function with
approximate degree into a function on variables with approximate degree at least . In particular, if , then
is polynomially larger than . Moreover, if is computed by a
polynomial-size Boolean circuit of constant depth, then so is .
By recursively applying our transformation, for any constant we
exhibit an AC function of approximate degree . This
improves over the best previous lower bound of due to
Aaronson and Shi (J. ACM 2004), and nearly matches the trivial upper bound of
that holds for any function. Our lower bounds also apply to
(quasipolynomial-size) DNFs of polylogarithmic width.
We describe several applications of these results. We give:
* For any constant , an lower bound on the
quantum communication complexity of a function in AC.
* A Boolean function with approximate degree at least ,
where is the certificate complexity of . This separation is optimal
up to the term in the exponent.
* Improved secret sharing schemes with reconstruction procedures in AC.Comment: 40 pages, 1 figur
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