If VNP Is Hard, Then so Are Equations for It

Assuming that the Permanent polynomial requires algebraic circuits of exponential size, we show that the class VNP does not have efficiently computable equations. In other words, any nonzero polynomial that vanishes on the coefficient vectors of all polynomials in the class VNP requires algebraic circuits of super-polynomial size. In a recent work of Chatterjee, Kumar, Ramya, Saptharishi and Tengse (FOCS 2020), it was shown that the subclasses of VP and VNP consisting of polynomials with bounded integer coefficients do have equations with small algebraic circuits. Their work left open the possibility that these results could perhaps be extended to all of VP or VNP. The results in this paper show that assuming the hardness of Permanent, at least for VNP, allowing polynomials with large coefficients does indeed incur a significant blow up in the circuit complexity of equations

Young Flattenings in the Schur module basis

There are several isomorphic constructions for the irreducible polynomial representations of the general linear group in characteristic zero. The two most well-known versions are called Schur modules and Weyl modules. Steven Sam used a Weyl module implementation in 2009 for his Macaulay2 package PieriMaps. This implementation can be used to compute so-called Young flattenings of polynomials. Over the Schur module basis Oeding and Farnsworth describe a simple combinatorial procedure that is supposed to give the Young flattening, but their construction is not equivariant. In this paper we clarify this issue, present the full details of the theory of Young flattenings in the Schur module basis, and give a software implementation in this basis. Using Reuven Hodges' recently discovered Young tableau straightening algorithm in the Schur module basis as a subroutine, our implementation outperforms Sam's PieriMaps implementation by several orders of magnitude on many examples, in particular for powers of linear forms, which is the case of highest interest for proving border Waring rank lower bounds