Pseudorandomness and Fourier Growth Bounds for Width-3 Branching Programs

We present an explicit pseudorandom generator for oblivious, read-once, width-3 branching programs, which can read their input bits in any order. The generator has seed length O~( log^3 n ). The previously best known seed length for this model is n^{1/2+o(1)} due to Impagliazzo, Meka, and Zuckerman (FOCS\u2712). Our work generalizes a recent result of Reingold, Steinke, and Vadhan (RANDOM\u2713) for permutation branching programs. The main technical novelty underlying our generator is a new bound on the Fourier growth of width-3, oblivious, read-once branching programs. Specifically, we show that for any f : {0,1}^n -> {0,1} computed by such a branching program, and k in [n], sum_{|s|=k} |hat{f}(s)| < n^2 * (O(log n))^k, where f(x) = sum_s hat{f}(s) (-1)^ is the standard Fourier transform over Z_2^n. The base O(log n) of the Fourier growth is tight up to a factor of log log n

Pseudorandom Bits for Oblivious Branching Programs

We construct a pseudorandom generator that fools known-order read-k oblivious branching programs and, more generally, any linear length oblivious branching program. For polynomial width branching programs, the seed lengths in our constructions are O(n^(1−1/2^(k−1))) (for the read-k case) and O(n/log log n) (for the linear length case). Previously, the best construction for these models required seed length (1 − Ω(1))n

The Power of Adaptivity in Quantum Query Algorithms

Motivated by limitations on the depth of near-term quantum devices, we study the depth-computation trade-off in the query model, where the depth corresponds to the number of adaptive query rounds and the computation per layer corresponds to the number of parallel queries per round. We achieve the strongest known separation between quantum algorithms with $r$ versus $r-1$ rounds of adaptivity. We do so by using the $k$-fold Forrelation problem introduced by Aaronson and Ambainis (SICOMP'18). For $k=2r$, this problem can be solved using an $r$ round quantum algorithm with only one query per round, yet we show that any $r-1$ round quantum algorithm needs an exponential (in the number of qubits) number of parallel queries per round. Our results are proven following the Fourier analytic machinery developed in recent works on quantum-classical separations. The key new component in our result are bounds on the Fourier weights of quantum query algorithms with bounded number of rounds of adaptivity. These may be of independent interest as they distinguish the polynomials that arise from such algorithms from arbitrary bounded polynomials of the same degree.Comment: 35 pages, 9 figure

Pseudorandom Generators for Width-3 Branching Programs

We construct pseudorandom generators of seed length $\tilde{O}(\log(n)\cdot \log(1/\epsilon))$ that $\epsilon$-fool ordered read-once branching programs (ROBPs) of width $3$ and length $n$. For unordered ROBPs, we construct pseudorandom generators with seed length $\tilde{O}(\log(n) \cdot \mathrm{poly}(1/\epsilon))$. This is the first improvement for pseudorandom generators fooling width $3$ ROBPs since the work of Nisan [Combinatorica, 1992]. Our constructions are based on the `iterated milder restrictions' approach of Gopalan et al. [FOCS, 2012] (which further extends the Ajtai-Wigderson framework [FOCS, 1985]), combined with the INW-generator [STOC, 1994] at the last step (as analyzed by Braverman et al. [SICOMP, 2014]). For the unordered case, we combine iterated milder restrictions with the generator of Chattopadhyay et al. [CCC, 2018]. Two conceptual ideas that play an important role in our analysis are: (1) A relabeling technique allowing us to analyze a relabeled version of the given branching program, which turns out to be much easier. (2) Treating the number of colliding layers in a branching program as a progress measure and showing that it reduces significantly under pseudorandom restrictions. In addition, we achieve nearly optimal seed-length $\tilde{O}(\log(n/\epsilon))$ for the classes of: (1) read-once polynomials on $n$ variables, (2) locally-monotone ROBPs of length $n$ and width $3$ (generalizing read-once CNFs and DNFs), and (3) constant-width ROBPs of length $n$ having a layer of width $2$ in every consecutive $\mathrm{poly}\log(n)$ layers.Comment: 51 page

Pseudorandomness and Fourier Growth Bounds for Width-3 Branching Programs

We present an explicit pseudorandom generator for oblivious, read-once, width-3 branching programs, which can read their input bits in any order. The generator has seed length O~( log^3 n ). The previously best known seed length for this model is n^{1/2+o(1)} due to Impagliazzo, Meka, and Zuckerman (FOCS'12). Our work generalizes a recent result of Reingold, Steinke, and Vadhan (RANDOM'13) for permutation branching programs. The main technical novelty underlying our generator is a new bound on the Fourier growth of width-3, oblivious, read-once branching programs. Specifically, we show that for any f : {0,1}^n -> {0,1} computed by such a branching program, and k in [n], sum_{|s|=k} |hat{f}(s)| is the standard Fourier transform over Z_2^n. The base O(log n) of the Fourier growth is tight up to a factor of log log n.Engineering and Applied Science