Related papers: The intersection of two halfspaces has high thresh…
The algebraic degree is an important parameter of Boolean functions used in cryptography. When a function in a large number of variables is not given explicitly in algebraic normal form, it might not be feasible to compute its degree.…
One of the major open problems in complexity theory is to demonstrate an explicit function which requires super logarithmic depth, a.k.a, the $\mathbf{P}$ versus $\mathbf{NC^1}$ problem. The current best depth lower bound is $(3-o(1))\cdot…
We study the approximability of general convex sets in $\mathbb{R}^n$ by intersections of halfspaces, where the approximation quality is measured with respect to the standard Gaussian distribution $N(0,I_n)$ and the complexity of an…
In the problem of semialgebraic range searching, we are to preprocess a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^D$ such that the subset of points inside a semialgebraic region described by $O(1)$ polynomial inequalities of degree $\Delta$ can be found…
In the classic point location problem, one is given an arbitrary dataset $X \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ of $n$ points with query access to an unknown halfspace $f : \mathbb{R}^d \to \{0,1\}$, and the goal is to learn the label of every point in…
We study function estimation in the empirical Bayes setting for Poisson and normal means. Specifically, given observations $Y_i\sim f(\cdot; \theta_i)$ with latent parameters $\theta_i\sim \pi$, the goal is to estimate…
The $\epsilon$-approximate degree of a function $f\colon X \to \{0, 1\}$ is the least degree of a multivariate real polynomial $p$ such that $|p(x)-f(x)| \leq \epsilon$ for all $x \in X$. We determine the $\epsilon$-approximate degree of…
We improve both upper and lower bounds for the distribution-free testing of monotone conjunctions. Given oracle access to an unknown Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ and sampling oracle access to an unknown distribution…
Let $\mathsf{TH}_k$ denote the $k$-out-of-$n$ threshold function: given $n$ input Boolean variables, the output is $1$ if and only if at least $k$ of the inputs are $1$. We consider the problem of computing the $\mathsf{TH}_k$ function…
We establish a lower bound of $\Omega{(\sqrt{n})}$ on the bounded-error quantum query complexity of read-once Boolean functions, providing evidence for the conjecture that $\Omega(\sqrt{D(f)})$ is a lower bound for all Boolean functions.…
Based on the recent breakthrough of Huang (2019), we show that for any total Boolean function $f$, $\bullet \quad \mathrm{deg}(f) = O(\widetilde{\mathrm{deg}}(f)^2)$: The degree of $f$ is at most quadratic in the approximate degree of $f$.…
A real polynomial $P(X_1,..., X_n)$ sign represents $f: A^n \to \{0,1\}$ if for every $(a_1, ..., a_n) \in A^n$, the sign of $P(a_1,...,a_n)$ equals $(-1)^{f(a_1,...,a_n)}$. Such sign representations are well-studied in computer science and…
We give a "regularity lemma" for degree-d polynomial threshold functions (PTFs) over the Boolean cube {-1,1}^n. This result shows that every degree-d PTF can be decomposed into a constant number of subfunctions such that almost all of the…
We study the function $$\mbox{KVol} : (X,\omega)\mapsto \mbox{Vol} (X,\omega) \sup_{\alpha,\beta} \frac{\mbox{Int} (\alpha,\beta)}{l_g (\alpha) l_g (\beta)}$$ defined on the moduli spaces of translation surfaces. More precisely, let…
Determining the approximate degree composition for Boolean functions remains a significant unsolved problem in Boolean function complexity. In recent decades, researchers have concentrated on proving that approximate degree composes for…
The Fourier-Walsh expansion of a Boolean function $f \colon \{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ is its unique representation as a multilinear polynomial. The Kindler-Safra theorem (2002) asserts that if in the expansion of $f$, the total weight…
We prove that the Fourier dimension of any Boolean function with Fourier sparsity $s$ is at most $O\left(s^{2/3}\right)$. Our proof method yields an improved bound of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{s})$ assuming a conjecture of…
A halfspace is a function $f\colon\{-1,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ of the form $f(x)=\mathbb{1}(a\cdot x>t)$, where $\sum_i a_i^2=1$. We show that if $f$ is a halfspace with $\mathbb{E}[f]=\epsilon$ and $a'=\max_i |a_i|$, then the degree-1…
We give a general method for proving quantum lower bounds for problems with small range. Namely, we show that, for any symmetric problem defined on functions $f:\{1, ..., N\}\to\{1, ..., M\}$, its polynomial degree is the same for all…
An open problem that is widely regarded as one of the most important in quantum query complexity is to resolve the quantum query complexity of the k-distinctness function on inputs of size N. While the case of k=2 (also called Element…