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

Local Testing for Membership in Lattices

Motivated by the structural analogies between point lattices and linear error-correcting codes, and by the mature theory on locally testable codes, we initiate a systematic study of local testing for membership in lattices. Testing membership in lattices is also motivated in practice, by applications to integer programming, error detection in lattice-based communication, and cryptography. Apart from establishing the conceptual foundations of lattice testing, our results include the following: 1. We demonstrate upper and lower bounds on the query complexity of local testing for the well-known family of code formula lattices. Furthermore, we instantiate our results with code formula lattices constructed from Reed-Muller codes, and obtain nearly-tight bounds. 2. We show that in order to achieve low query complexity, it is sufficient to design one-sided non-adaptive canonical tests. This result is akin to, and based on an analogous result for error-correcting codes due to Ben-Sasson et al. (SIAM J. Computing 35(1) pp1-21)

Symmetries in algebraic Property Testing

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 94-100).Modern computational tasks often involve large amounts of data, and efficiency is a very desirable feature of such algorithms. Local algorithms are especially attractive, since they can imply global properties by only inspecting a small window into the data. In Property Testing, a local algorithm should perform the task of distinguishing objects satisfying a given property from objects that require many modifications in order to satisfy the property. A special place in Property Testing is held by algebraic properties: they are some of the first properties to be tested, and have been heavily used in the PCP and LTC literature. We focus on conditions under which algebraic properties are testable, following the general goal of providing a more unified treatment of these properties. In particular, we explore the notion of symmetry in relation to testing, a direction initiated by Kaufman and Sudan. We investigate the interplay between local testing, symmetry and dual structure in linear codes, by showing both positive and negative results. On the negative side, we exhibit a counterexample to a conjecture proposed by Alon, Kaufman, Krivelevich, Litsyn, and Ron aimed at providing general sufficient conditions for testing. We show that a single codeword of small weight in the dual family together with the property of being invariant under a 2-transitive group of permutations do not necessarily imply testing. On the positive side, we exhibit a large class of codes whose duals possess a strong structural property ('the single orbit property'). Namely, they can be specified by a single codeword of small weight and the group of invariances of the code. Hence we show that sparsity and invariance under the affine group of permutations are sufficient conditions for a notion of very structured testing. These findings also reveal a new characterization of the extensively studied BCH codes. As a by-product, we obtain a more explicit description of structured tests for the special family of BCH codes of design distance 5.by Elena Grigorescu.Ph.D

Testability of linear-invariant properties

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-80).Property Testing is the study of super-efficient algorithms that solve "approximate decision problems" with high probability. More precisely, given a property P, a testing algorithm for P is a randomized algorithm that makes a small number of queries into its input and distinguishes between whether the input satisfies P or whether the input is "far" from satisfying P, where "farness" of an object from P is measured by the minimum fraction of places in its representation that needs to be modified in order for it to satisfy P. Property testing and ideas arising from it have had significant impact on complexity theory, pseudorandomness, coding theory, computational learning theory, and extremal combinatorics. In the history of the area, a particularly important role has been played by linearinvariant properties, i.e., properties of Boolean functions on the hypercube which are closed under linear transformations of the domain. Examples of such properties include linearity, homogeneousness, Reed-Muller codes, and Fourier sparsity. In this thesis, we describe a framework that can lead to a unified analysis of the testability of all linear-invariant properties, drawing on techniques from additive combinatorics and from graph theory. We also show the first nontrivial lowerbound for the query complexity of a natural testable linear-invariant property.by Arnab Bhattacharyya.Ph.D