Related papers: The intersection of two halfspaces has high thresh…
We prove lower bounds for the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) in the Sum-of-Squares (SoS) proof system. Our main result is that for every Boolean function $f: \{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$, SoS requires degree $\Omega(s^{1-\epsilon})$…
Let $ACC \circ THR$ be the class of constant-depth circuits comprised of AND, OR, and MOD$m$ gates (for some constant $m > 1$), with a bottom layer of gates computing arbitrary linear threshold functions. This class of circuits can be seen…
The problem of learning threshold functions is a fundamental one in machine learning. Classical learning theory implies sample complexity of $O(\xi^{-1} \log(1/\beta))$ (for generalization error $\xi$ with confidence $1-\beta$). The private…
Let $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ be a convex domain and let $f:\Omega \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ be a subharmonic function, $\Delta f \geq 0$, which satisfies $f \geq 0$ on the boundary $\partial \Omega$. Then $$ \int_{\Omega}{f ~dx} \leq…
The tree-width of a multivariate polynomial is the tree-width of the hypergraph with hyperedges corresponding to its terms. Multivariate polynomials of bounded tree-width have been studied by Makowsky and Meer as a new sparsity condition…
It is known that a positive Boolean function f depending on n variables has at least n + 1 extremal points, i.e. minimal ones and maximal zeros. We show that f has exactly n + 1 extremal points if and only if it is linear read-once. The…
The relative-error property testing model was introduced in [CDHLNSY24] to facilitate the study of property testing for "sparse" Boolean-valued functions, i.e. ones for which only a small fraction of all input assignments satisfy the…
We provide asymptotically sharp bounds for the Gaussian surface area and the Gaussian noise sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions. In particular we show that if $f$ is a degree-$d$ polynomial threshold function, then its Gaussian…
We investigate the structure of polynomials of degree four in many variables over a fixed prime field $\mathbb{F}=\mathbb{F}_{p}$. In 2007, Green and Tao proved that if a polynomial $f:\mathbb{F}^{n}\rightarrow\mathbb{F}$ is poorly…
In this article we give several new results on the complexity of algorithms that learn Boolean functions from quantum queries and quantum examples. Hunziker et al. conjectured that for any class C of Boolean functions, the number of quantum…
We prove a simple, nearly tight lower bound on the approximate degree of the two-level $\mathsf{AND}$-$\mathsf{OR}$ tree using symmetrization arguments. Specifically, we show that $\widetilde{\mathrm{deg}}(\mathsf{AND}_m \circ…
We count algebraic points of bounded height and degree on the graphs of certain functions analytic on the unit disk, obtaining a bound which is polynomial in the degree and in the logarithm of the multiplicative height. We combine this work…
We consider the problem of testing whether an unknown Boolean function $f$ is monotone versus $\epsilon$-far from every monotone function. The two main results of this paper are a new lower bound and a new algorithm for this well-studied…
Proving super-polynomial size lower bounds for $\textsf{TC}^0$, the class of constant-depth, polynomial-size circuits of Majority gates, is a notorious open problem in complexity theory. A major frontier is to prove that $\textsf{NEXP}$…
We show that sharp thresholds for Boolean functions directly imply average-case circuit lower bounds. More formally we show that any Boolean function exhibiting a sharp enough threshold at \emph{arbitrary} critical density cannot be…
An important problem in machine learning theory is to understand the approximation and generalization properties of two-layer neural networks in high dimensions. To this end, researchers have introduced the Barron space…
We use Grothendieck's dessins d'enfant to show that if $P$ and $Q$ are two real polynomials, any real function of the form $x^\alpha(1-x)^{\beta} P - Q$, has at most $\deg P +\deg Q + 2$ roots in the interval $]0,~1[$. As a consequence, we…
We study the problem of PAC learning halfspaces in the reliable agnostic model of Kalai et al. (2012). The reliable PAC model captures learning scenarios where one type of error is costlier than the others. Our main positive result is a new…
For any real numbers $B \ge 1$ and $\delta \in (0, 1)$ and function $f: [0, B] \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$, let $d_{B; \delta} (f) \in \mathbb{Z}_{> 0}$ denote the minimum degree of a polynomial $p(x)$ satisfying $\sup_{x \in [0, B]} \big| p(x)…
A fundamental problem in shape matching and geometric similarity is computing the maximum area overlap between two polygons under translation. For general simple polygons, the best-known algorithm runs in $O((nm)^2 \log(nm))$ time [Mount,…