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.
