Related papers: The Correct Exponent for the Gotsman-Linial Conjec…

In 1991, Craig Gotsman and Nathan Linial conjectured that for all $n$ and $d$, the average sensitivity of a degree-$d$ polynomial threshold function on $n$ variables is maximized by the degree-$d$ symmetric polynomial which computes the…

We give the first non-trivial upper bounds on the average sensitivity and noise sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions. More specifically, for a Boolean function f on n variables equal to the sign of a real, multivariate polynomial…

We give the first non-trivial upper bounds on the average sensitivity and noise sensitivity of degree-$d$ polynomial threshold functions (PTFs). These bounds hold both for PTFs over the Boolean hypercube and for PTFs over $\R^n$ under the…

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…

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…

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 introduce a new measure of robustness for statistical estimators, which we call \emph{empirical sensitivity}. An estimator $\hat \theta$ has bounded empirical sensitivity if, with high probability over a dataset $X = (X_1, \dots, X_n)…

We give an infinite class of counterexamples to the Gotsman-Linial conjecture when d = 2. On the other hand, we establish an asymptotic form of the conjecture for quadratic threshold functions whose non-zero quadratic terms define a graph…

Let $G$ be the interior domain of a piecewise analytic Jordan curve without cusps. Let $\{p_n\}_{n=0}^\infty$ be the sequence of polynomials that are orthonormal over $G$ with respect to the area measure, with each $p_n$ having leading…

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…

We give an upper bound in O(d ^((n+1)/2)) for the number of critical points of a normal random polynomial with degree d and at most n variables. Using the large deviation principle for the spectral value of large random matrices we obtain…

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)…

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…

We show that unbounded fan-in boolean formulas of depth $d+1$ and size $s$ have average sensitivity $O(\frac{1}{d}\log s)^d$. In particular, this gives a tight $2^{\Omega(d(n^{1/d}-1))}$ lower bound on the size of depth $d+1$ formulas…

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 fundamental problem of estimating the mean of a $d$-dimensional distribution with covariance $\Sigma \preccurlyeq \sigma^2 I_d$ given $n$ samples. When $d = 1$, \cite{catoni} showed an estimator with error $(1+o(1)) \cdot…

Nisan and Szegedy (CC 1994) showed that any Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}$ that depends on all its input variables, when represented as a real-valued multivariate polynomial $P(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$, has degree at least $\log…

We show examples of total Boolean functions that depend on $n$ variables and have spectral sensitivity $\Theta(\sqrt{\log n})$, which is asymptotically minimal. Our main new function combines the Hamming code with the Boolean address…

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…

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…