Related papers: An optimal lower bound for monotonicity testing ov…
We provide a generic technique for constructing families of submodular functions to obtain lower bounds for submodular function minimization (SFM). Applying this technique, we prove that any deterministic SFM algorithm on a ground set of…
We study the problem of testing whether a function $f: \mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ is a polynomial of degree at most $d$ in the \emph{distribution-free} testing model. Here, the distance between functions is measured with respect to an…
The use of monotonicity and Tarski's theorem in existence proofs of equilibria is very widespread in economics, while Tarski's theorem is also often used for similar purposes in the context of verification. However, there has been…
We study monotone neural networks with threshold gates where all the weights (other than the biases) are non-negative. We focus on the expressive power and efficiency of representation of such networks. Our first result establishes that…
We present an $\tilde{O}(n^{2/3}/\epsilon^2)$-query algorithm that tests whether an unknown Boolean function $f\colon\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}$ is unate (i.e., every variable is either non-decreasing or non-increasing) or $\epsilon$-far…
For given integers $n$ and $d$, both at least 2, we consider a homogeneous multivariate polynomial $f_d$ of degree $d$ in variables indexed by the edges of the complete graph on $n$ vertices and coefficients depending on cardinalities of…
A Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n\to \{0,1\}$ is $k$-linear if it returns the sum (over the binary field $F_2$) of $k$ coordinates of the input. In this paper, we study property testing of the classes $k$-Linear, the class of all $k$-linear…
Recent work has established that, for every positive integer $k$, every $n$-node graph has a $(2k-1)$-spanner on $O(f^{1-1/k} n^{1+1/k})$ edges that is resilient to $f$ edge or vertex faults. For vertex faults, this bound is tight. However,…
We study the problem of estimating the number of defective items $d$ within a pile of $n$ elements up to a multiplicative factor of $\Delta>1$, using deterministic group testing algorithms. We bring lower and upper bounds on the number of…
We study quantum algorithms for verifying properties of the output probability distribution of a classical or quantum circuit, given access to the source code that generates the distribution. We consider the basic task of uniformity…
We study the Excluded Grid Theorem, a fundamental structural result in graph theory, that was proved by Robertson and Seymour in their seminal work on graph minors. The theorem states that there is a function $f: \mathbb{Z}^+ \to…
We provide a first-order necessary and sufficient condition for optimality of lower semicontinuous functions on Banach spaces using the concept of subdifferential. From the sufficient condition we derive that any subdifferential operator is…
Problems in econometrics, insurance, reliability engineering, and statistics quite often rely on the assumption that certain functions are non-decreasing. To satisfy this requirement, researchers frequently model the underlying phenomena…
The model of relative-error property testing of Boolean functions has been the subject of significant recent research effort [CDH+24][CPPS25a][CPPS25b] In this paper we consider the problem of relative-error testing an unknown and arbitrary…
We study the electrical distribution network reconfiguration problem, defined as follows. We are given an undirected graph with a root vertex, demand at each non-root vertex, and resistance on each edge. Then, we want to find a spanning…
In many practical applications, heuristic or approximation algorithms are used to efficiently solve the task at hand. However their solutions frequently do not satisfy natural monotonicity properties of optimal solutions. In this work we…
We consider several related problems of estimating the 'sparsity' or number of nonzero elements $d$ in a length $n$ vector $\mathbf{x}$ by observing only $\mathbf{b} = M \odot \mathbf{x}$, where $M$ is a predesigned test matrix independent…
A sequence $f\colon\{1,\dots,n\}\to\mathbb{R}$ contains a permutation $\pi$ of length $k$ if there exist $i_1<\dots<i_k$ such that, for all $x,y$, $f(i_x)<f(i_y)$ if and only if $\pi(x)<\pi(y)$; otherwise, $f$ is said to be $\pi$-free. In…
We show that any depth-$d$ circuit for determining whether an $n$-node graph has an $s$-to-$t$ path of length at most $k$ must have size $n^{\Omega(k^{1/d}/d)}$. The previous best circuit size lower bounds for this problem were…
Plotting a learner's average performance against the number of training samples results in a learning curve. Studying such curves on one or more data sets is a way to get to a better understanding of the generalization properties of this…