Related papers: The intersection of two halfspaces has high thresh…
The sensitivity of a Boolean function f is the maximum over all inputs x, of the number of sensitive coordinates of x. The well-known sensitivity conjecture of Nisan (see also Nisan and Szegedy) states that every sensitivity-s Boolean…
The approximate degree of a Boolean function is the least degree of a real multilinear polynomial approximating it in the $\ell_\infty$-norm over the Boolean hypercube. We show that the approximate degree of the Bipartite Perfect Matching…
Several recent works [DHLNSY25, CPPS25a, CPPS25b] have studied a model of property testing of Boolean functions under a \emph{relative-error} criterion. In this model, the distance from a target function $f: \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ that is…
We prove new bounds on the average sensitivity of the indicator function of an intersection of $k$ halfspaces. In particular, we prove the optimal bound of $O(\sqrt{n\log(k)})$. This generalizes a result of Nazarov, who proved the analogous…
We prove two main results on how arbitrary linear threshold functions $f(x) = \sign(w\cdot x - \theta)$ over the $n$-dimensional Boolean hypercube can be approximated by simple threshold functions. Our first result shows that every…
We consider the well-studied problem of learning intersections of halfspaces under the Gaussian distribution in the challenging \emph{agnostic learning} model. Recent work of Diakonikolas et al. (2021) shows that any Statistical Query (SQ)…
We show a partial Boolean function $f$ together with an input $x\in f^{-1}\left(*\right)$ such that both $C_{\bar{0}}\left(f,x\right)$ and $C_{\bar{1}}\left(f,x\right)$ are at least $C\left(f\right)^{2-o\left(1\right)}$. Due to recent…
We show strong (and surprisingly simple) lower bounds for weakly learning intersections of halfspaces in the improper setting. Strikingly little is known about this problem. For instance, it is not even known if there is a polynomial-time…
For $S \subseteq \{0,1\}^n$ a Boolean function $f \colon S \to \{-1,1\}$ is a polynomial threshold function (PTF) of degree $d$ and weight $W$ if there is a polynomial $p$ with integer coefficients of degree $d$ and with sum of absolute…
The collision problem is to decide whether a function X:{1,..,n}->{1,..,n} is one-to-one or two-to-one, given that one of these is the case. We show a lower bound of Theta(n^{1/5}) on the number of queries needed by a quantum computer to…
The approximate degree of a Boolean function is the minimum degree of real polynomial that approximates it pointwise. For any Boolean function, its approximate degree serves as a lower bound on its quantum query complexity, and generically…
The approximate non-deterministic degree of a Boolean function $f$, denoted $\mathsf{ndeg}_\epsilon(f)$ (written $\mathsf{N}_\epsilon(f)$ for brevity), is the minimum degree of a real polynomial $p$ such that $0 \le |p(x)| \le \epsilon$…
An integer polynomial $p$ of $n$ variables is called a \emph{threshold gate} for a Boolean function $f$ of $n$ variables if for all $x \in \zoon$ $f(x)=1$ if and only if $p(x)\geq 0$. The \emph{weight} of a threshold gate is the sum of its…
We show an equivalence between 1-query quantum algorithms and representations by degree-2 polynomials. Namely, a partial Boolean function $f$ is computable by a 1-query quantum algorithm with error bounded by $\epsilon<1/2$ iff $f$ can be…
We study the computational power of polynomial threshold functions, that is, threshold functions of real polynomials over the boolean cube. We provide two new results bounding the computational power of this model. Our first result shows…
There exist well-known tight bounds on the error between a function $f \in C^{\,n + 1}([-1, 1])$ and its best polynomial approximation of degree $n$. We show that the error meets these bounds when and only when $f$ is a polynomial of degree…
Recent breakthroughs in quantum query complexity have shown that any formula of size n can be evaluated with O(sqrt(n)log(n)/log log(n)) many quantum queries in the bounded-error setting [FGG08, ACRSZ07, RS08b, Rei09]. In particular, this…
Polynomial threshold functions (PTFs) are an important low-complexity class of Boolean functions, with strong connections to learning theory and approximation theory. Recent work on learning and testing PTFs has exploited structural and…
Polynomial approximations to boolean functions have led to many positive results in computer science. In particular, polynomial approximations to the sign function underly algorithms for agnostically learning halfspaces, as well as…
We study the probabilistic degree over reals of the OR function on $n$ variables. For an error parameter $\epsilon$ in (0,1/3), the $\epsilon$-error probabilistic degree of any Boolean function $f$ over reals is the smallest non-negative…