Related papers: Natural Proofs Versus Derandomization
Razborov and Rudich have shown that so-called "natural proofs" are not useful for separating P from NP unless hard pseudorandom number generators do not exist. This famous result is widely regarded as a serious barrier to proving strong…
In combinatorics, the probabilistic method is a very powerful tool to prove the existence of combinatorial objects with interesting and useful properties. Explicit constructions of objects with such properties are often very difficult, or…
Different techniques have been used to prove several transference theorems of the form "nontrivial algorithms for a circuit class C yield circuit lower bounds against C". In this survey we revisit many of these results. We discuss how…
One of the prominent current challenges in complexity theory is the attempt to prove lower bounds for $TC^0$, the class of constant-depth, polynomial-size circuits with majority gates. Relying on the results of Williams (2013), an appealing…
Hardness magnification reduces major complexity separations (such as $\mathsf{\mathsf{EXP}} \nsubseteq \mathsf{NC}^1$) to proving lower bounds for some natural problem $Q$ against weak circuit models. Several recent works [OS18, MMW19,…
A PCP is a proof system for NP in which the proof can be checked by a probabilistic verifier. The verifier is only allowed to read a very small portion of the proof, and in return is allowed to err with some bounded probability. The…
Many proofs in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science are based on the probabilistic method. To prove the existence of a good object, we pick a random object and show that it is bad with low probability. This method is…
Distributed proofs are mechanisms enabling the nodes of a network to collectivity and efficiently check the correctness of Boolean predicates on the structure of the network, or on data-structures distributed over the nodes (e.g., spanning…
For a complexity class $C$ and language $L$, a constructive separation of $L \notin C$ gives an efficient algorithm (also called a refuter) to find counterexamples (bad inputs) for every $C$-algorithm attempting to decide $L$. We study the…
Understanding and creating mathematics using natural mathematical language - the mixture of symbolic and natural language used by humans - is a challenging and important problem for driving progress in machine learning. As a step in this…
The framework of algebraically natural proofs was independently introduced in the works of Forbes, Shpilka and Volk (2018), and Grochow, Kumar, Saks and Saraf (2017), to study the efficacy of commonly used techniques for proving lower…
Self-stabilization is a strong property that guarantees that a network always resume correct behavior starting from an arbitrary initial state. Weaker guarantees have later been introduced to cope with impossibility results: probabilistic…
We prove a general structural theorem for a wide family of local algorithms, which includes property testers, local decoders, and PCPs of proximity. Namely, we show that the structure of every algorithm that makes $q$ adaptive queries and…
Verification and validation of cyber-physical systems (CPS) via large-scale simulation often surface failures that are hard to interpret, especially when triggered by interactions between continuous and discrete behaviors at specific events…
Counterfactual explanations describe how to modify a feature vector in order to flip the outcome of a trained classifier. Obtaining robust counterfactual explanations is essential to provide valid algorithmic recourse and meaningful…
We study certificates in static data structures. In the cell-probe model, certificates are the cell probes which can uniquely identify the answer to the query. As a natural notion of nondeterministic cell probes, lower bounds for…
Randomized techniques play a fundamental role in theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, in particular for the design of efficient algorithms and construction of combinatorial objects. The basic goal in derandomization theory…
For a property $P$ and a sub-property $P'$, we say that $P$ is $P'$-partially testable with $q$ queries if there exists an algorithm that distinguishes, with high probability, inputs in $P'$ from inputs $\epsilon$-far from $P$ by using $q$…
We analyse how the standard reductions between constraint satisfaction problems affect their proof complexity. We show that, for the most studied propositional, algebraic, and semi-algebraic proof systems, the classical constructions of…
Methods to certify the robustness of neural networks in the presence of input uncertainty are vital in safety-critical settings. Most certification methods in the literature are designed for adversarial or worst-case inputs, but researchers…