Parallel repetition: simplifications and the no-signaling case

Consider a game where a refereed a referee chooses (x,y) according to a publicly known distribution P_XY, sends x to Alice, and y to Bob. Without communicating with each other, Alice responds with a value "a" and Bob responds with a value "b". Alice and Bob jointly win if a publicly known predicate Q(x,y,a,b) holds. Let such a game be given and assume that the maximum probability that Alice and Bob can win is v<1. Raz (SIAM J. Comput. 27, 1998) shows that if the game is repeated n times in parallel, then the probability that Alice and Bob win all games simultaneously is at most v'^(n/log(s)), where s is the maximal number of possible responses from Alice and Bob in the initial game, and v' is a constant depending only on v. In this work, we simplify Raz's proof in various ways and thus shorten it significantly. Further we study the case where Alice and Bob are not restricted to local computations and can use any strategy which does not imply communication among them.Comment: 27 pages; v2:PRW97 strengthening added, references added, typos fixed; v3: fixed error in the proof of the no-signaling theorem, minor change

Upper Tail Estimates with Combinatorial Proofs

We study generalisations of a simple, combinatorial proof of a Chernoff bound similar to the one by Impagliazzo and Kabanets (RANDOM, 2010). In particular, we prove a randomized version of the hitting property of expander random walks and apply it to obtain a concentration bound for expander random walks which is essentially optimal for small deviations and a large number of steps. At the same time, we present a simpler proof that still yields a "right" bound settling a question asked by Impagliazzo and Kabanets. Next, we obtain a simple upper tail bound for polynomials with input variables in $[0, 1]$ which are not necessarily independent, but obey a certain condition inspired by Impagliazzo and Kabanets. The resulting bound is used by Holenstein and Sinha (FOCS, 2012) in the proof of a lower bound for the number of calls in a black-box construction of a pseudorandom generator from a one-way function. We then show that the same technique yields the upper tail bound for the number of copies of a fixed graph in an Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graph, matching the one given by Janson, Oleszkiewicz and Ruci\'nski (Israel J. Math, 2002).Comment: Full version of the paper from STACS 201

Generating a Quadratic Forms from a Given Genus

Given a non-empty genus in $n$ dimensions with determinant $d$, we give a randomized algorithm that outputs a quadratic form from this genus. The time complexity of the algorithm is poly$(n,\log d)$; assuming Generalized Riemann Hypothesis (GRH).Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1409.619