1,056 research outputs found
A Toolbox for Barriers on Interactive Oracle Proofs
Interactive oracle proofs (IOPs) are a proof system model that combines features of interactive proofs (IPs) and probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs). IOPs have prominent applications in complexity theory and cryptography, most notably to constructing succinct arguments.
In this work, we study the limitations of IOPs, as well as their relation to those of PCPs. We present a versatile toolbox of IOP-to-IOP transformations containing tools for: (i) length and round reduction; (ii) improving completeness; and (iii) derandomization.
We use this toolbox to establish several barriers for IOPs:
-- Low-error IOPs can be transformed into low-error PCPs. In other words, interaction can be used to construct low-error PCPs; alternatively, low-error IOPs are as hard to construct as low-error PCPs. This relates IOPs to PCPs in the regime of the sliding scale conjecture for inverse-polynomial soundness error.
-- Limitations of quasilinear-size IOPs for 3SAT with small soundness error.
-- Limitations of IOPs where query complexity is much smaller than round complexity.
-- Limitations of binary-alphabet constant-query IOPs.
We believe that our toolbox will prove useful to establish additional barriers beyond our work
Derandomized Parallel Repetition via Structured PCPs
A PCP is a proof system for NP in which the proof can be checked by a
probabilistic verifier. The verifier is only allowed to read a very small
portion of the proof, and in return is allowed to err with some bounded
probability. The probability that the verifier accepts a false proof is called
the soundness error, and is an important parameter of a PCP system that one
seeks to minimize. Constructing PCPs with sub-constant soundness error and, at
the same time, a minimal number of queries into the proof (namely two) is
especially important due to applications for inapproximability.
In this work we construct such PCP verifiers, i.e., PCPs that make only two
queries and have sub-constant soundness error. Our construction can be viewed
as a combinatorial alternative to the "manifold vs. point" construction, which
is the only construction in the literature for this parameter range. The
"manifold vs. point" PCP is based on a low degree test, while our construction
is based on a direct product test. We also extend our construction to yield a
decodable PCP (dPCP) with the same parameters. By plugging in this dPCP into
the scheme of Dinur and Harsha (FOCS 2009) one gets an alternative construction
of the result of Moshkovitz and Raz (FOCS 2008), namely: a construction of
two-query PCPs with small soundness error and small alphabet size.
Our construction of a PCP is based on extending the derandomized direct
product test of Impagliazzo, Kabanets and Wigderson (STOC 09) to a derandomized
parallel repetition theorem. More accurately, our PCP construction is obtained
in two steps. We first prove a derandomized parallel repetition theorem for
specially structured PCPs. Then, we show that any PCP can be transformed into
one that has the required structure, by embedding it on a de-Bruijn graph
On the Impossibility of Probabilistic Proofs in Relativized Worlds
We initiate the systematic study of probabilistic proofs in relativized worlds, where the goal is to understand, for a given oracle, the possibility of "non-trivial" proof systems for deterministic or nondeterministic computations that make queries to the oracle.
This question is intimately related to a recent line of work that seeks to improve the efficiency of probabilistic proofs for computations that use functionalities such as cryptographic hash functions and digital signatures, by instantiating them via constructions that are "friendly" to known constructions of probabilistic proofs. Informally, negative results about probabilistic proofs in relativized worlds provide evidence that this line of work is inherent and, conversely, positive results provide a way to bypass it.
We prove several impossibility results for probabilistic proofs relative to natural oracles. Our results provide strong evidence that tailoring certain natural functionalities to known probabilistic proofs is inherent
Distributed PCP Theorems for Hardness of Approximation in P
We present a new distributed model of probabilistically checkable proofs
(PCP). A satisfying assignment to a CNF formula is
shared between two parties, where Alice knows , Bob knows
, and both parties know . The goal is to have
Alice and Bob jointly write a PCP that satisfies , while
exchanging little or no information. Unfortunately, this model as-is does not
allow for nontrivial query complexity. Instead, we focus on a non-deterministic
variant, where the players are helped by Merlin, a third party who knows all of
.
Using our framework, we obtain, for the first time, PCP-like reductions from
the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) to approximation problems in P.
In particular, under SETH we show that there are no truly-subquadratic
approximation algorithms for Bichromatic Maximum Inner Product over
{0,1}-vectors, Bichromatic LCS Closest Pair over permutations, Approximate
Regular Expression Matching, and Diameter in Product Metric. All our
inapproximability factors are nearly-tight. In particular, for the first two
problems we obtain nearly-polynomial factors of ; only
-factor lower bounds (under SETH) were known before
A Hypergraph Dictatorship Test with Perfect Completeness
A hypergraph dictatorship test is first introduced by Samorodnitsky and
Trevisan and serves as a key component in their unique games based \PCP
construction. Such a test has oracle access to a collection of functions and
determines whether all the functions are the same dictatorship, or all their
low degree influences are Their test makes queries and has
amortized query complexity but has an inherent loss of
perfect completeness. In this paper we give an adaptive hypergraph dictatorship
test that achieves both perfect completeness and amortized query complexity
.Comment: Some minor correction
Quantum Locally Testable Codes
We initiate the study of quantum Locally Testable Codes (qLTCs). We provide a
definition together with a simplification, denoted sLTCs, for the special case
of stabilizer codes, together with some basic results using those definitions.
The most crucial parameter of such codes is their soundness, ,
namely, the probability that a randomly chosen constraint is violated as a
function of the distance of a word from the code (, the relative
distance from the code, is called the proximity). We then proceed to study
limitations on qLTCs. In our first main result we prove a surprising,
inherently quantum, property of sLTCs: for small values of proximity, the
better the small-set expansion of the interaction graph of the constraints, the
less sound the qLTC becomes. This phenomenon, which can be attributed to
monogamy of entanglement, stands in sharp contrast to the classical setting.
The complementary, more intuitive, result also holds: an upper bound on the
soundness when the code is defined on poor small-set expanders (a bound which
turns out to be far more difficult to show in the quantum case). Together we
arrive at a quantum upper-bound on the soundness of stabilizer qLTCs set on any
graph, which does not hold in the classical case. Many open questions are
raised regarding what possible parameters are achievable for qLTCs. In the
appendix we also define a quantum analogue of PCPs of proximity (PCPPs) and
point out that the result of Ben-Sasson et. al. by which PCPPs imply LTCs with
related parameters, carries over to the sLTCs. This creates a first link
between qLTCs and quantum PCPs.Comment: Some of the results presented here appeared in an initial form in our
quant-ph submission arXiv:1301.3407. This is a much extended and improved
version. 30 pages, no figure
Hard Properties with (Very) Short PCPPs and Their Applications
We show that there exist properties that are maximally hard for testing, while still admitting PCPPs with a proof size very close to linear. Specifically, for every fixed ?, we construct a property P^(?)? {0,1}^n satisfying the following: Any testing algorithm for P^(?) requires ?(n) many queries, and yet P^(?) has a constant query PCPP whose proof size is O(n?log^(?)n), where log^(?) denotes the ? times iterated log function (e.g., log^(2)n = log log n). The best previously known upper bound on the PCPP proof size for a maximally hard to test property was O(n?polylog(n)).
As an immediate application, we obtain stronger separations between the standard testing model and both the tolerant testing model and the erasure-resilient testing model: for every fixed ?, we construct a property that has a constant-query tester, but requires ?(n/log^(?)(n)) queries for every tolerant or erasure-resilient tester
Smooth and Strong PCPs
Probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs) can be verified based only on a constant amount of random queries, such that any correct claim has a proof that is always accepted, and incorrect claims are rejected with high probability (regardless of the given alleged proof). We consider two possible features of PCPs:
- A PCP is strong if it rejects an alleged proof of a correct claim with probability proportional to its distance from some correct proof of that claim.
- A PCP is smooth if each location in a proof is queried with equal probability.
We prove that all sets in NP have PCPs that are both smooth and strong, are of polynomial length, and can be verified based on a constant number of queries. This is achieved by following the proof of the PCP theorem of Arora, Lund, Motwani, Sudan and Szegedy (JACM, 1998), providing a stronger analysis of the Hadamard and Reed - Muller based PCPs and a refined PCP composition theorem. In fact, we show that any set in NP has a smooth strong canonical PCP of Proximity (PCPP), meaning that there is an efficiently computable bijection of NP witnesses to correct proofs. This improves on the recent construction of Dinur, Gur and Goldreich (ITCS, 2019) of PCPPs that are strong canonical but inherently non-smooth.
Our result implies the hardness of approximating the satisfiability of "stable" 3CNF formulae with bounded variable occurrence, where stable means that the number of clauses violated by an assignment is proportional to its distance from a satisfying assignment (in the relative Hamming metric). This proves a hypothesis used in the work of Friggstad, Khodamoradi and Salavatipour (SODA, 2019), suggesting a connection between the hardness of these instances and other stable optimization problems
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