251 research outputs found
Small-depth Multilinear Formula Lower Bounds for Iterated Matrix Multiplication, with Applications
The complexity of Iterated Matrix Multiplication is a central theme in Computational Complexity theory, as the problem is closely related to the problem of separating various complexity classes within P. In this paper, we study the algebraic formula complexity of multiplying d many 2x2 matrices, denoted IMM_d, and show that the well-known divide-and-conquer algorithm cannot be significantly improved at any depth, as long as the formulas are multilinear.
Formally, for each depth Delta <= log d, we show that any product-depth Delta multilinear formula for IMM_d must have size exp(Omega(Delta d^{1/Delta})). It also follows from this that any multilinear circuit of product-depth Delta for the same polynomial of the above form must have a size of exp(Omega(d^{1/Delta})). In particular, any polynomial-sized multilinear formula for IMM_d must have depth Omega(log d), and any polynomial-sized multilinear circuit for IMM_d must have depth Omega(log d/log log d). Both these bounds are tight up to constant factors.
Our lower bound has the following consequences for multilinear formula complexity.
Depth-reduction: A well-known result of Brent (JACM 1974) implies that any formula of size s can be converted to one of size s^{O(1)} and depth O(log s); further, this reduction continues to hold for multilinear formulas. On the other hand, our lower bound implies that any depth-reduction in the multilinear setting cannot reduce the depth to o(log s) without a superpolynomial blow-up in size.
Separations from general formulas: Shpilka and Yehudayoff (FnTTCS 2010) asked whether general formulas can be more efficient than multilinear formulas for computing multilinear polynomials. Our result, along with a non-trivial upper bound for IMM_d implied by a result of Gupta, Kamath, Kayal and Saptharishi (SICOMP 2016), shows that for any size s and product-depth Delta = o(log s), general formulas of size s and product-depth Delta cannot be converted to multilinear formulas of size s^{O(1)} and product-depth Delta, when the underlying field has characteristic zero
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)
Arithmetic circuits: the chasm at depth four gets wider
In their paper on the "chasm at depth four", Agrawal and Vinay have shown
that polynomials in m variables of degree O(m) which admit arithmetic circuits
of size 2^o(m) also admit arithmetic circuits of depth four and size 2^o(m).
This theorem shows that for problems such as arithmetic circuit lower bounds or
black-box derandomization of identity testing, the case of depth four circuits
is in a certain sense the general case. In this paper we show that smaller
depth four circuits can be obtained if we start from polynomial size arithmetic
circuits. For instance, we show that if the permanent of n*n matrices has
circuits of size polynomial in n, then it also has depth 4 circuits of size
n^O(sqrt(n)*log(n)). Our depth four circuits use integer constants of
polynomial size. These results have potential applications to lower bounds and
deterministic identity testing, in particular for sums of products of sparse
univariate polynomials. We also give an application to boolean circuit
complexity, and a simple (but suboptimal) reduction to polylogarithmic depth
for arithmetic circuits of polynomial size and polynomially bounded degree
A Near-Optimal Depth-Hierarchy Theorem for Small-Depth Multilinear Circuits
We study the size blow-up that is necessary to convert an algebraic circuit
of product-depth to one of product-depth in the multilinear
setting.
We show that for every positive
there is an explicit multilinear polynomial on variables
that can be computed by a multilinear formula of product-depth and
size , but not by any multilinear circuit of product-depth and
size less than . This result is tight up to the
constant implicit in the double exponent for all
This strengthens a result of Raz and Yehudayoff (Computational Complexity
2009) who prove a quasipolynomial separation for constant-depth multilinear
circuits, and a result of Kayal, Nair and Saha (STACS 2016) who give an
exponential separation in the case
Our separating examples may be viewed as algebraic analogues of variants of
the Graph Reachability problem studied by Chen, Oliveira, Servedio and Tan
(STOC 2016), who used them to prove lower bounds for constant-depth Boolean
circuits
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
Functional Lower Bounds for Restricted Arithmetic Circuits of Depth Four
Recently, Forbes, Kumar and Saptharishi [CCC, 2016] proved that there exists
an explicit -variate and degree polynomial such
that if any depth four circuit of bounded formal degree which computes
a polynomial of bounded individual degree , that is functionally
equivalent to , then must have size .
The motivation for their work comes from Boolean Circuit Complexity. Based on
a characterization for circuits by Yao [FOCS, 1985] and Beigel and
Tarui [CC, 1994], Forbes, Kumar and Saptharishi [CCC, 2016] observed that
functions in can also be computed by algebraic
circuits (i.e., circuits of the form -- sums
of powers of polynomials) of size. Thus they argued that a
"functional" lower bound for an explicit
polynomial against circuits would imply a
lower bound for the "corresponding Boolean function" of against non-uniform
. In their work, they ask if their lower bound be extended to
circuits.
In this paper, for large integers and such that , we show that any circuit of
bounded individual degree at most that
functionally computes Iterated Matrix Multiplication polynomial
() over must have size . Since Iterated
Matrix Multiplication over is functionally in
, improvement of the afore mentioned lower bound to hold for
quasipolynomially large values of individual degree would imply a fine-grained
separation of from
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