Related papers: The Round Complexity of Small Set Intersection
Round complexity is an extensively studied metric of distributed algorithms. In contrast, our knowledge of the \emph{message complexity} of distributed computing problems and its relationship (if any) with round complexity is still quite…
We consider a standard distributed optimisation setting where $N$ machines, each holding a $d$-dimensional function $f_i$, aim to jointly minimise the sum of the functions $\sum_{i = 1}^N f_i (x)$. This problem arises naturally in…
The Collision problem is to decide whether a given list of numbers $(x_1,\ldots,x_n)\in[n]^n$ is $1$-to-$1$ or $2$-to-$1$ when promised one of them is the case. We show an $n^{\Omega(1)}$ randomised communication lower bound for the natural…
Buhrman, Cleve and Wigderson (STOC'98) observed that for every Boolean function $f : \{-1, 1\}^n \to \{-1, 1\}$ and $\bullet : \{-1, 1\}^2 \to \{-1, 1\}$ the two-party bounded-error quantum communication complexity of $(f \circ \bullet)$ is…
We study the round and communication complexities of various cryptographic protocols. We give tight lower bounds on the round and communication complexities of any fully black-box reduction of a statistically hiding commitment scheme from…
Three decades of research in communication complexity have led to the invention of a number of techniques to lower bound randomized communication complexity. The majority of these techniques involve properties of large submatrices…
We show a tight lower bound of $\Omega(N \log\log N)$ on the number of transmissions required to compute the parity of $N$ input bits with constant error in a noisy communication network of $N$ randomly placed sensors, each having one input…
We study the message complexity of leader election in synchronous networks of diameter two. Our main contribution is a refined analysis of the randomized algorithm proposed by Chatterjee et al. [DC, 2020]. In their work, the authors…
We consider the problem of finding a maximal independent set (MIS) in the shared blackboard communication model with vertex-partitioned inputs. There are $n$ players corresponding to vertices of an undirected graph, and each player sees the…
A strong direct product theorem states that if we want to compute $k$ independent instances of a function, using less than $k$ times the resources needed for one instance, then the overall success probability will be exponentially small in…
We revisit the distributed counting problem, where a server must continuously approximate the total number of events occurring across $k$ sites while minimizing communication. The communication complexity of this problem is known to be…
This document collects the lecture notes from my course "Communication Complexity (for Algorithm Designers),'' taught at Stanford in the winter quarter of 2015. The two primary goals of the course are: 1. Learn several canonical problems…
We consider the minimal k-grouping problem: given a graph G=(V,E) and a constant k, partition G into subgraphs of diameter no greater than k, such that the union of any two subgraphs has diameter greater than k. We give a silent…
We show lower bounds of $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ and $\Omega(n^{1/4})$ on the randomized and quantum communication complexity, respectively, of all $n$-variable read-once Boolean formulas. Our results complement the recent lower bound of…
We consider the problem of forming a distributed queue in the adversarial dynamic network model of Kuhn, Lynch, and Oshman (STOC 2010) in which the network topology changes from round to round but the network stays connected. This is a…
In this paper we study the time complexity of the single-source reachability problem and the single-source shortest path problem for directed unweighted graphs in the Broadcast CONGEST model. We focus on the case where the diameter $D$ of…
In this work, we formulate and study a data dissemination problem, which can be viewed as a generalization of the index coding problem and of the data exchange problem to networks with an arbitrary topology. We define $r$-solvable networks,…
We prove three new lower bounds for graph connectivity in the $1$-bit broadcast congested clique model, BCC$(1)$. First, in the KT-$0$ version of BCC$(1)$, in which nodes are aware of neighbors only through port numbers, we show an…
Information-theoretic topological secure aggregation (TSA)\cite{zhang2026information_regular} enables distributed users to compute neighborhood sums over arbitrary networks without revealing individual inputs, while remaining…
We revisit classical connectivity problems in the CONGEST model of distributed computing. By using techniques from fault tolerant network design, we show improved constructions, some of which are even "local" (i.e., with $\widetilde{O}(1)$…