3,985 research outputs found
Functional lower bounds for arithmetic circuits and connections to boolean circuit complexity
We say that a circuit over a field functionally computes an
-variate polynomial if for every we have that . This is in contrast to syntactically computing , when as
formal polynomials. In this paper, we study the question of proving lower
bounds for homogeneous depth- and depth- arithmetic circuits for
functional computation. We prove the following results :
1. Exponential lower bounds homogeneous depth- arithmetic circuits for a
polynomial in .
2. Exponential lower bounds for homogeneous depth- arithmetic circuits
with bounded individual degree for a polynomial in .
Our main motivation for this line of research comes from our observation that
strong enough functional lower bounds for even very special depth-
arithmetic circuits for the Permanent imply a separation between and
. Thus, improving the second result to get rid of the bounded individual
degree condition could lead to substantial progress in boolean circuit
complexity. Besides, it is known from a recent result of Kumar and Saptharishi
[KS15] that over constant sized finite fields, strong enough average case
functional lower bounds for homogeneous depth- circuits imply
superpolynomial lower bounds for homogeneous depth- circuits.
Our proofs are based on a family of new complexity measures called shifted
evaluation dimension, and might be of independent interest
Superpolynomial lower bounds for general homogeneous depth 4 arithmetic circuits
In this paper, we prove superpolynomial lower bounds for the class of
homogeneous depth 4 arithmetic circuits. We give an explicit polynomial in VNP
of degree in variables such that any homogeneous depth 4 arithmetic
circuit computing it must have size .
Our results extend the works of Nisan-Wigderson [NW95] (which showed
superpolynomial lower bounds for homogeneous depth 3 circuits),
Gupta-Kamath-Kayal-Saptharishi and Kayal-Saha-Saptharishi [GKKS13, KSS13]
(which showed superpolynomial lower bounds for homogeneous depth 4 circuits
with bounded bottom fan-in), Kumar-Saraf [KS13a] (which showed superpolynomial
lower bounds for homogeneous depth 4 circuits with bounded top fan-in) and
Raz-Yehudayoff and Fournier-Limaye-Malod-Srinivasan [RY08, FLMS13] (which
showed superpolynomial lower bounds for multilinear depth 4 circuits). Several
of these results in fact showed exponential lower bounds.
The main ingredient in our proof is a new complexity measure of {\it bounded
support} shifted partial derivatives. This measure allows us to prove
exponential lower bounds for homogeneous depth 4 circuits where all the
monomials computed at the bottom layer have {\it bounded support} (but possibly
unbounded degree/fan-in), strengthening the results of Gupta et al and Kayal et
al [GKKS13, KSS13]. This new lower bound combined with a careful "random
restriction" procedure (that transforms general depth 4 homogeneous circuits to
depth 4 circuits with bounded support) gives us our final result
Arithmetic Circuit Lower Bounds via MaxRank
We introduce the polynomial coefficient matrix and identify maximum rank of
this matrix under variable substitution as a complexity measure for
multivariate polynomials. We use our techniques to prove super-polynomial lower
bounds against several classes of non-multilinear arithmetic circuits. In
particular, we obtain the following results :
As our main result, we prove that any homogeneous depth-3 circuit for
computing the product of matrices of dimension requires
size. This improves the lower bounds by Nisan and
Wigderson(1995) when .
There is an explicit polynomial on variables and degree at most
for which any depth-3 circuit of product dimension at most
(dimension of the space of affine forms feeding into each
product gate) requires size . This generalizes the lower bounds
against diagonal circuits proved by Saxena(2007). Diagonal circuits are of
product dimension 1.
We prove a lower bound on the size of product-sparse
formulas. By definition, any multilinear formula is a product-sparse formula.
Thus, our result extends the known super-polynomial lower bounds on the size of
multilinear formulas by Raz(2006).
We prove a lower bound on the size of partitioned arithmetic
branching programs. This result extends the known exponential lower bound on
the size of ordered arithmetic branching programs given by Jansen(2008).Comment: 22 page
On the Limits of Depth Reduction at Depth 3 Over Small Finite Fields
Recently, Gupta et.al. [GKKS2013] proved that over Q any -variate
and -degree polynomial in VP can also be computed by a depth three
circuit of size . Over fixed-size
finite fields, Grigoriev and Karpinski proved that any
circuit that computes (or ) must be of size
[GK1998]. In this paper, we prove that over fixed-size finite fields, any
circuit for computing the iterated matrix multiplication
polynomial of generic matrices of size , must be of size
. The importance of this result is that over fixed-size
fields there is no depth reduction technique that can be used to compute all
the -variate and -degree polynomials in VP by depth 3 circuits of
size . The result [GK1998] can only rule out such a possibility
for depth 3 circuits of size .
We also give an example of an explicit polynomial () in
VNP (not known to be in VP), for which any circuit computing
it (over fixed-size fields) must be of size . The
polynomial we consider is constructed from the combinatorial design. An
interesting feature of this result is that we get the first examples of two
polynomials (one in VP and one in VNP) such that they have provably stronger
circuit size lower bounds than Permanent in a reasonably strong model of
computation.
Next, we prove that any depth 4
circuit computing
(over any field) must be of size . To the best of our knowledge, the polynomial is the
first example of an explicit polynomial in VNP such that it requires
size depth four circuits, but no known matching
upper bound
Sums of products of polynomials in few variables : lower bounds and polynomial identity testing
We study the complexity of representing polynomials as a sum of products of
polynomials in few variables. More precisely, we study representations of the
form such that each is
an arbitrary polynomial that depends on at most variables. We prove the
following results.
1. Over fields of characteristic zero, for every constant such that , we give an explicit family of polynomials , where
is of degree in variables, such that any
representation of the above type for with requires . This strengthens a recent result of Kayal and Saha
[KS14a] which showed similar lower bounds for the model of sums of products of
linear forms in few variables. It is known that any asymptotic improvement in
the exponent of the lower bounds (even for ) would separate VP
and VNP[KS14a].
2. We obtain a deterministic subexponential time blackbox polynomial identity
testing (PIT) algorithm for circuits computed by the above model when and
the individual degree of each variable in are at most and
for any constant . We get quasipolynomial running
time when . The PIT algorithm is obtained by combining our
lower bounds with the hardness-randomness tradeoffs developed in [DSY09, KI04].
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first nontrivial PIT algorithm for
this model (even for the case ), and the first nontrivial PIT algorithm
obtained from lower bounds for small depth circuits
On Computing Multilinear Polynomials Using Multi-r-ic Depth Four Circuits
International audienceIn this paper, we are interested in understanding the complexity of computing multilinear polynomials using depth four circuits in which polynomial computed at every node has a bound on the individual degree of r (referred to as multi-r-ic circuits). The goal of this study is to make progress towards proving superpolynomial lower bounds for general depth four circuits computing multilinear polynomials, by proving better and better bounds as the value of r increases. Recently, Kayal, Saha and Tavenas (Theory of Computing, 2018) showed that any depth four arithmetic circuit of bounded individual degree r computing a multilinear polynomial on n^O(1) variables and degree d = o(n), must have size at least (n/r^1.1)^{\sqrt{d/r}} when r is o(d) and is strictly less than n^1/1.1. This bound however deteriorates with increasing r. It is a natural question to ask if we can prove a bound that does not deteriorate with increasing r or a bound that holds for a larger regime of r. We here prove a lower bound which does not deteriorate with r , however for a specific instance of d = d (n) but for a wider range of r. Formally, we show that there exists an explicit polynomial on n^{O(1)} variables and degree Θ(log^2(n)) such that any depth four circuit of bounded individual degree r < n^0.2 must have size at least exp(Ω (log^2 n)). This improvement is obtained by suitably adapting the complexity measure of Kayal et al. (Theory of Computing, 2018). This adaptation of the measure is inspired by the complexity measure used by Kayal et al. (SIAM J. Computing, 2017)
On the complexity of partial derivatives
The method of partial derivatives is one of the most successful lower bound
methods for arithmetic circuits. It uses as a complexity measure the dimension
of the span of the partial derivatives of a polynomial. In this paper, we
consider this complexity measure as a computational problem: for an input
polynomial given as the sum of its nonzero monomials, what is the complexity of
computing the dimension of its space of partial derivatives? We show that this
problem is #P-hard and we ask whether it belongs to #P. We analyze the "trace
method", recently used in combinatorics and in algebraic complexity to lower
bound the rank of certain matrices. We show that this method provides a
polynomial-time computable lower bound on the dimension of the span of partial
derivatives, and from this method we derive closed-form lower bounds. We leave
as an open problem the existence of an approximation algorithm with reasonable
performance guarantees.A slightly shorter version of this paper was presented
at STACS'17. In this new version we have corrected a typo in Section 4.1, and
added a reference to Shitov's work on tensor rank
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