Towards Blackbox Identity Testing of Log-Variate Circuits

Derandomization of blackbox identity testing reduces to extremely special circuit models. After a line of work, it is known that focusing on circuits with constant-depth and constantly many variables is enough (Agrawal,Ghosh,Saxena, STOC\u2718) to get to general hitting-sets and circuit lower bounds. This inspires us to study circuits with few variables, eg. logarithmic in the size s. We give the first poly(s)-time blackbox identity test for n=O(log s) variate size-s circuits that have poly(s)-dimensional partial derivative space; eg. depth-3 diagonal circuits (or Sigma wedge Sigma^n). The former model is well-studied (Nisan,Wigderson, FOCS\u2795) but no poly(s2^n)-time identity test was known before us. We introduce the concept of cone-closed basis isolation and prove its usefulness in studying log-variate circuits. It subsumes the previous notions of rank-concentration studied extensively in the context of ROABP models

Polynomial Identity Testing for Low Degree Polynomials with Optimal Randomness

We give a randomized polynomial time algorithm for polynomial identity testing for the class of n-variate poynomials of degree bounded by d over a field ?, in the blackbox setting. Our algorithm works for every field ? with | ? | ? d+1, and uses only d log n + log (1/ ?) + O(d log log n) random bits to achieve a success probability 1 - ? for some ? > 0. In the low degree regime that is d ? n, it hits the information theoretic lower bound and differs from it only in the lower order terms. Previous best known algorithms achieve the number of random bits (Guruswami-Xing, CCC\u2714 and Bshouty, ITCS\u2714) that are constant factor away from our bound. Like Bshouty, we use Sidon sets for our algorithm. However, we use a new construction of Sidon sets to achieve the improved bound. We also collect two simple constructions of hitting sets with information theoretically optimal size against the class of n-variate, degree d polynomials. Our contribution is that we give new, very simple proofs for both the constructions

Variety Membership Testing in Algebraic Complexity Theory

In this thesis, we study some of the central problems in algebraic complexity theory through the lens of the variety membership testing problem. In the first part, we investigate whether separations between algebraic complexity classes can be phrased as instances of the variety membership testing problem. For this, we compare some complexity classes with their closures. We show that monotone commutative single-(source, sink) ABPs are closed. Further, we prove that multi-(source, sink) ABPs are not closed in both the monotone commutative and the noncommutative settings. However, the corresponding complexity classes are closed in all these settings. Next, we observe a separation between the complexity class VQP and the closure of VNP. In the second part, we cover the blackbox polynomial identity testing (PIT) problem, and the rank computation problem of symbolic matrices, both phrasable as instances of the variety membership testing problem. For the blackbox PIT, we give a randomized polynomial time algorithm that uses the number of random bits that matches the information-theoretic lower bound, differing from it only in the lower order terms. For the rank computation problem, we give a deterministic polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) when the degrees of the entries of the matrices are bounded by a constant. Finally, we show NP-hardness of two problems on 3-tensors, both of which are instances of the variety membership testing problem. The first problem is the orbit closure containment problem for the action of GLk x GLm x GLn on 3-tensors, while the second problem is to decide whether the slice rank of a given 3-tensor is at most r