85 research outputs found
Pseudorandomness via the discrete Fourier transform
We present a new approach to constructing unconditional pseudorandom
generators against classes of functions that involve computing a linear
function of the inputs. We give an explicit construction of a pseudorandom
generator that fools the discrete Fourier transforms of linear functions with
seed-length that is nearly logarithmic (up to polyloglog factors) in the input
size and the desired error parameter. Our result gives a single pseudorandom
generator that fools several important classes of tests computable in logspace
that have been considered in the literature, including halfspaces (over general
domains), modular tests and combinatorial shapes. For all these classes, our
generator is the first that achieves near logarithmic seed-length in both the
input length and the error parameter. Getting such a seed-length is a natural
challenge in its own right, which needs to be overcome in order to derandomize
RL - a central question in complexity theory.
Our construction combines ideas from a large body of prior work, ranging from
a classical construction of [NN93] to the recent gradually increasing
independence paradigm of [KMN11, CRSW13, GMRTV12], while also introducing some
novel analytic machinery which might find other applications
List Decoding Tensor Products and Interleaved Codes
We design the first efficient algorithms and prove new combinatorial bounds
for list decoding tensor products of codes and interleaved codes. We show that
for {\em every} code, the ratio of its list decoding radius to its minimum
distance stays unchanged under the tensor product operation (rather than
squaring, as one might expect). This gives the first efficient list decoders
and new combinatorial bounds for some natural codes including multivariate
polynomials where the degree in each variable is bounded. We show that for {\em
every} code, its list decoding radius remains unchanged under -wise
interleaving for an integer . This generalizes a recent result of Dinur et
al \cite{DGKS}, who proved such a result for interleaved Hadamard codes
(equivalently, linear transformations). Using the notion of generalized Hamming
weights, we give better list size bounds for {\em both} tensoring and
interleaving of binary linear codes. By analyzing the weight distribution of
these codes, we reduce the task of bounding the list size to bounding the
number of close-by low-rank codewords. For decoding linear transformations,
using rank-reduction together with other ideas, we obtain list size bounds that
are tight over small fields.Comment: 32 page
Public projects, Boolean functions and the borders of Border's theorem
Border's theorem gives an intuitive linear characterization of the feasible
interim allocation rules of a Bayesian single-item environment, and it has
several applications in economic and algorithmic mechanism design. All known
generalizations of Border's theorem either restrict attention to relatively
simple settings, or resort to approximation. This paper identifies a
complexity-theoretic barrier that indicates, assuming standard complexity class
separations, that Border's theorem cannot be extended significantly beyond the
state-of-the-art. We also identify a surprisingly tight connection between
Myerson's optimal auction theory, when applied to public project settings, and
some fundamental results in the analysis of Boolean functions.Comment: Accepted to ACM EC 201
Finding Skewed Subcubes Under a Distribution
Say that we are given samples from a distribution ? over an n-dimensional space. We expect or desire ? to behave like a product distribution (or a k-wise independent distribution over its marginals for small k). We propose the problem of enumerating/list-decoding all large subcubes where the distribution ? deviates markedly from what we expect; we refer to such subcubes as skewed subcubes. Skewed subcubes are certificates of dependencies between small subsets of variables in ?. We motivate this problem by showing that it arises naturally in the context of algorithmic fairness and anomaly detection.
In this work we focus on the special but important case where the space is the Boolean hypercube, and the expected marginals are uniform. We show that the obvious definition of skewed subcubes can lead to intractable list sizes, and propose a better definition of a minimal skewed subcube, which are subcubes whose skew cannot be attributed to a larger subcube that contains it. Our main technical contribution is a list-size bound for this definition and an algorithm to efficiently find all such subcubes. Both the bound and the algorithm rely on Fourier-analytic techniques, especially the powerful hypercontractive inequality.
On the lower bounds side, we show that finding skewed subcubes is as hard as the sparse noisy parity problem, and hence our algorithms cannot be improved on substantially without a breakthrough on this problem which is believed to be intractable. Motivated by this, we study alternate models allowing query access to ? where finding skewed subcubes might be easier
Polynomials that Sign Represent Parity and Descartes' Rule of Signs
A real polynomial sign represents if
for every , the sign of equals
. Such sign representations are well-studied in computer
science and have applications to computational complexity and computational
learning theory. In this work, we present a systematic study of tradeoffs
between degree and sparsity of sign representations through the lens of the
parity function. We attempt to prove bounds that hold for any choice of set
. We show that sign representing parity over with the
degree in each variable at most requires sparsity at least . We show
that a tradeoff exists between sparsity and degree, by exhibiting a sign
representation that has higher degree but lower sparsity. We show a lower bound
of on the sparsity of polynomials of any degree representing
parity over . We prove exact bounds on the sparsity of such
polynomials for any two element subset . The main tool used is Descartes'
Rule of Signs, a classical result in algebra, relating the sparsity of a
polynomial to its number of real roots. As an application, we use bounds on
sparsity to derive circuit lower bounds for depth-two AND-OR-NOT circuits with
a Threshold Gate at the top. We use this to give a simple proof that such
circuits need size to compute parity, which improves the previous bound
of due to Goldmann (1997). We show a tight lower bound of
for the inner product function over .Comment: To appear in Computational Complexit
Better Pseudorandom Generators from Milder Pseudorandom Restrictions
We present an iterative approach to constructing pseudorandom generators,
based on the repeated application of mild pseudorandom restrictions. We use
this template to construct pseudorandom generators for combinatorial rectangles
and read-once CNFs and a hitting set generator for width-3 branching programs,
all of which achieve near-optimal seed-length even in the low-error regime: We
get seed-length O(log (n/epsilon)) for error epsilon. Previously, only
constructions with seed-length O(\log^{3/2} n) or O(\log^2 n) were known for
these classes with polynomially small error.
The (pseudo)random restrictions we use are milder than those typically used
for proving circuit lower bounds in that we only set a constant fraction of the
bits at a time. While such restrictions do not simplify the functions
drastically, we show that they can be derandomized using small-bias spaces.Comment: To appear in FOCS 201
The Connectivity of Boolean Satisfiability: Computational and Structural Dichotomies
Boolean satisfiability problems are an important benchmark for questions
about complexity, algorithms, heuristics and threshold phenomena. Recent work
on heuristics, and the satisfiability threshold has centered around the
structure and connectivity of the solution space. Motivated by this work, we
study structural and connectivity-related properties of the space of solutions
of Boolean satisfiability problems and establish various dichotomies in
Schaefer's framework.
On the structural side, we obtain dichotomies for the kinds of subgraphs of
the hypercube that can be induced by the solutions of Boolean formulas, as well
as for the diameter of the connected components of the solution space. On the
computational side, we establish dichotomy theorems for the complexity of the
connectivity and st-connectivity questions for the graph of solutions of
Boolean formulas. Our results assert that the intractable side of the
computational dichotomies is PSPACE-complete, while the tractable side - which
includes but is not limited to all problems with polynomial time algorithms for
satisfiability - is in P for the st-connectivity question, and in coNP for the
connectivity question. The diameter of components can be exponential for the
PSPACE-complete cases, whereas in all other cases it is linear; thus, small
diameter and tractability of the connectivity problems are remarkably aligned.
The crux of our results is an expressibility theorem showing that in the
tractable cases, the subgraphs induced by the solution space possess certain
good structural properties, whereas in the intractable cases, the subgraphs can
be arbitrary
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