122,953 research outputs found
Circuit Depth Reductions
The best known size lower bounds against unrestricted circuits have remained
around for several decades. Moreover, the only known technique for proving
lower bounds in this model, gate elimination, is inherently limited to proving
lower bounds of less than . In this work, we propose a non-gate-elimination
approach for obtaining circuit lower bounds, via certain depth-three lower
bounds. We prove that every (unbounded-depth) circuit of size can be
expressed as an OR of -CNFs. For DeMorgan formulas, the best
known size lower bounds have been stuck at around for decades.
Under a plausible hypothesis about probabilistic polynomials, we show that
-size DeMorgan formulas have
-size depth-3 circuits which are approximate
sums of -degree polynomials over .
While these structural results do not immediately lead to new lower bounds,
they do suggest new avenues of attack on these longstanding lower bound
problems.
Our results complement the classical depth- reduction results of Valiant,
which show that logarithmic-depth circuits of linear size can be computed by an
OR of -CNFs, and slightly stronger results for
series-parallel circuits. It is known that no purely graph-theoretic reduction
could yield interesting depth-3 circuits from circuits of super-logarithmic
depth. We overcome this limitation (for small-size circuits) by taking into
account both the graph-theoretic and functional properties of circuits and
formulas.
We show that improvements of the following pseudorandom constructions imply
new circuit lower bounds: dispersers for varieties, correlation with constant
degree polynomials, matrix rigidity, and hardness for depth- circuits with
constant bottom fan-in
Circuit complexity, proof complexity, and polynomial identity testing
We introduce a new algebraic proof system, which has tight connections to
(algebraic) circuit complexity. In particular, we show that any
super-polynomial lower bound on any Boolean tautology in our proof system
implies that the permanent does not have polynomial-size algebraic circuits
(VNP is not equal to VP). As a corollary to the proof, we also show that
super-polynomial lower bounds on the number of lines in Polynomial Calculus
proofs (as opposed to the usual measure of number of monomials) imply the
Permanent versus Determinant Conjecture. Note that, prior to our work, there
was no proof system for which lower bounds on an arbitrary tautology implied
any computational lower bound.
Our proof system helps clarify the relationships between previous algebraic
proof systems, and begins to shed light on why proof complexity lower bounds
for various proof systems have been so much harder than lower bounds on the
corresponding circuit classes. In doing so, we highlight the importance of
polynomial identity testing (PIT) for understanding proof complexity.
More specifically, we introduce certain propositional axioms satisfied by any
Boolean circuit computing PIT. We use these PIT axioms to shed light on
AC^0[p]-Frege lower bounds, which have been open for nearly 30 years, with no
satisfactory explanation as to their apparent difficulty. We show that either:
a) Proving super-polynomial lower bounds on AC^0[p]-Frege implies VNP does not
have polynomial-size circuits of depth d - a notoriously open question for d at
least 4 - thus explaining the difficulty of lower bounds on AC^0[p]-Frege, or
b) AC^0[p]-Frege cannot efficiently prove the depth d PIT axioms, and hence we
have a lower bound on AC^0[p]-Frege.
Using the algebraic structure of our proof system, we propose a novel way to
extend techniques from algebraic circuit complexity to prove lower bounds in
proof complexity
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
A Generalized Method for Proving Polynomial Calculus Degree Lower Bounds
We study the problem of obtaining lower bounds for polynomial calculus (PC)
and polynomial calculus resolution (PCR) on proof degree, and hence by
[Impagliazzo et al. '99] also on proof size. [Alekhnovich and Razborov '03]
established that if the clause-variable incidence graph of a CNF formula F is a
good enough expander, then proving that F is unsatisfiable requires high PC/PCR
degree. We further develop the techniques in [AR03] to show that if one can
"cluster" clauses and variables in a way that "respects the structure" of the
formula in a certain sense, then it is sufficient that the incidence graph of
this clustered version is an expander. As a corollary of this, we prove that
the functional pigeonhole principle (FPHP) formulas require high PC/PCR degree
when restricted to constant-degree expander graphs. This answers an open
question in [Razborov '02], and also implies that the standard CNF encoding of
the FPHP formulas require exponential proof size in polynomial calculus
resolution. Thus, while Onto-FPHP formulas are easy for polynomial calculus, as
shown in [Riis '93], both FPHP and Onto-PHP formulas are hard even when
restricted to bounded-degree expanders.Comment: Full-length version of paper to appear in Proceedings of the 30th
Annual Computational Complexity Conference (CCC '15), June 201
Min-Rank Conjecture for Log-Depth Circuits
A completion of an m-by-n matrix A with entries in {0,1,*} is obtained by
setting all *-entries to constants 0 or 1. A system of semi-linear equations
over GF(2) has the form Mx=f(x), where M is a completion of A and f:{0,1}^n -->
{0,1}^m is an operator, the i-th coordinate of which can only depend on
variables corresponding to *-entries in the i-th row of A. We conjecture that
no such system can have more than 2^{n-c\cdot mr(A)} solutions, where c>0 is an
absolute constant and mr(A) is the smallest rank over GF(2) of a completion of
A. The conjecture is related to an old problem of proving super-linear lower
bounds on the size of log-depth boolean circuits computing linear operators x
--> Mx. The conjecture is also a generalization of a classical question about
how much larger can non-linear codes be than linear ones. We prove some special
cases of the conjecture and establish some structural properties of solution
sets.Comment: 22 pages, to appear in: J. Comput.Syst.Sci
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