6,954 research outputs found
Fourier sparsity, spectral norm, and the Log-rank conjecture
We study Boolean functions with sparse Fourier coefficients or small spectral
norm, and show their applications to the Log-rank Conjecture for XOR functions
f(x\oplus y) --- a fairly large class of functions including well studied ones
such as Equality and Hamming Distance. The rank of the communication matrix M_f
for such functions is exactly the Fourier sparsity of f. Let d be the F2-degree
of f and D^CC(f) stand for the deterministic communication complexity for
f(x\oplus y). We show that 1. D^CC(f) = O(2^{d^2/2} log^{d-2} ||\hat f||_1). In
particular, the Log-rank conjecture holds for XOR functions with constant
F2-degree. 2. D^CC(f) = O(d ||\hat f||_1) = O(\sqrt{rank(M_f)}\logrank(M_f)).
We obtain our results through a degree-reduction protocol based on a variant of
polynomial rank, and actually conjecture that its communication cost is already
\log^{O(1)}rank(M_f). The above bounds also hold for the parity decision tree
complexity of f, a measure that is no less than the communication complexity
(up to a factor of 2).
Along the way we also show several structural results about Boolean functions
with small F2-degree or small spectral norm, which could be of independent
interest. For functions f with constant F2-degree: 1) f can be written as the
summation of quasi-polynomially many indicator functions of subspaces with
\pm-signs, improving the previous doubly exponential upper bound by Green and
Sanders; 2) being sparse in Fourier domain is polynomially equivalent to having
a small parity decision tree complexity; 3) f depends only on polylog||\hat
f||_1 linear functions of input variables. For functions f with small spectral
norm: 1) there is an affine subspace with co-dimension O(||\hat f||_1) on which
f is a constant; 2) there is a parity decision tree with depth O(||\hat f||_1
log ||\hat f||_0).Comment: v2: Corollary 31 of v1 removed because of a bug in the proof. (Other
results not affected.
Quantum entanglement, sum of squares, and the log rank conjecture
For every , we give an
-time algorithm for the vs
\emph{Best Separable State (BSS)} problem of distinguishing, given
an matrix corresponding to a quantum measurement,
between the case that there is a separable (i.e., non-entangled) state
that accepts with probability , and the case that every
separable state is accepted with probability at most .
Equivalently, our algorithm takes the description of a subspace (where can be either the real or
complex field) and distinguishes between the case that contains a
rank one matrix, and the case that every rank one matrix is at least
far (in distance) from .
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first improvement over the
brute-force -time algorithm for this problem. Our algorithm is based
on the \emph{sum-of-squares} hierarchy and its analysis is inspired by Lovett's
proof (STOC '14, JACM '16) that the communication complexity of every rank-
Boolean matrix is bounded by .Comment: 23 pages + 1 title-page + 1 table-of-content
Derandomized Graph Product Results using the Low Degree Long Code
In this paper, we address the question of whether the recent derandomization
results obtained by the use of the low-degree long code can be extended to
other product settings. We consider two settings: (1) the graph product results
of Alon, Dinur, Friedgut and Sudakov [GAFA, 2004] and (2) the "majority is
stablest" type of result obtained by Dinur, Mossel and Regev [SICOMP, 2009] and
Dinur and Shinkar [In Proc. APPROX, 2010] while studying the hardness of
approximate graph coloring.
In our first result, we show that there exists a considerably smaller
subgraph of which exhibits the following property (shown for
by Alon et al.): independent sets close in size to the
maximum independent set are well approximated by dictators.
The "majority is stablest" type of result of Dinur et al. and Dinur and
Shinkar shows that if there exist two sets of vertices and in
with very few edges with one endpoint in and another in
, then it must be the case that the two sets and share a single
influential coordinate. In our second result, we show that a similar "majority
is stablest" statement holds good for a considerably smaller subgraph of
. Furthermore using this result, we give a more efficient
reduction from Unique Games to the graph coloring problem, leading to improved
hardness of approximation results for coloring
Sensitivity Conjecture and Log-rank Conjecture for functions with small alternating numbers
The Sensitivity Conjecture and the Log-rank Conjecture are among the most
important and challenging problems in concrete complexity. Incidentally, the
Sensitivity Conjecture is known to hold for monotone functions, and so is the
Log-rank Conjecture for and with monotone
functions , where and are bit-wise AND and XOR,
respectively. In this paper, we extend these results to functions which
alternate values for a relatively small number of times on any monotone path
from to . These deepen our understandings of the two conjectures,
and contribute to the recent line of research on functions with small
alternating numbers
Likelihood Geometry
We study the critical points of monomial functions over an algebraic subset
of the probability simplex. The number of critical points on the Zariski
closure is a topological invariant of that embedded projective variety, known
as its maximum likelihood degree. We present an introduction to this theory and
its statistical motivations. Many favorite objects from combinatorial algebraic
geometry are featured: toric varieties, A-discriminants, hyperplane
arrangements, Grassmannians, and determinantal varieties. Several new results
are included, especially on the likelihood correspondence and its bidegree.
These notes were written for the second author's lectures at the CIME-CIRM
summer course on Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry at Levico Terme in June 2013.Comment: 45 pages; minor changes and addition
Small ball probability, Inverse theorems, and applications
Let be a real random variable with mean zero and variance one and
be a multi-set in . The random sum
where are iid copies of
is of fundamental importance in probability and its applications.
We discuss the small ball problem, the aim of which is to estimate the
maximum probability that belongs to a ball with given small radius,
following the discovery made by Littlewood-Offord and Erdos almost 70 years
ago. We will mainly focus on recent developments that characterize the
structure of those sets where the small ball probability is relatively
large. Applications of these results include full solutions or significant
progresses of many open problems in different areas.Comment: 47 page
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