Related papers: Distance-Sensitive Property Testing Lower Bounds
Fix a prime $p$ and a positive integer $R$. We study the property testing of functions $\mathbb F_p^n\to[R]$. We say that a property is testable if there exists an oblivious tester for this property with one-sided error and constant query…
The Gap-Hamming distance problem is the promise problem of deciding if the Hamming distance $h$ between two strings of length $n$ is greater than $a$ or less than $b$, where the gap $g=|a-b|\geq 1$ and $a$ and $b$ could depend on $n$. In…
Learned index structures aim to accelerate queries by training machine learning models to approximate the rank function associated with a database attribute. While effective in practice, their theoretical limitations are not fully…
We prove a tight lower bound (up to constant factors) on the sample complexity of any non-interactive local differentially private protocol for optimizing a linear function over the simplex. This lower bound also implies a tight lower bound…
We prove a lower bound of $\Omega(n^{1/2 - c})$, for all $c>0$, on the query complexity of (two-sided error) non-adaptive algorithms for testing whether an $n$-variable Boolean function is monotone versus constant-far from monotone. This…
A Boolean $k$-monotone function defined over a finite poset domain ${\cal D}$ alternates between the values $0$ and $1$ at most $k$ times on any ascending chain in ${\cal D}$. Therefore, $k$-monotone functions are natural generalizations of…
We study monotonicity testing of functions $f \colon \{0,1\}^d \to \{0,1\}$ using sample-based algorithms, which are only allowed to observe the value of $f$ on points drawn independently from the uniform distribution. A classic result by…
In this tutorial, we will survey known results on the complexity of conjunctive query evaluation in different settings, ranging from Boolean queries over counting to more complex models like enumeration and direct access. A particular focus…
We improve both upper and lower bounds for the distribution-free testing of monotone conjunctions. Given oracle access to an unknown Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ and sampling oracle access to an unknown distribution…
We show that for any constant $c>0$, any (two-sided error) adaptive algorithm for testing monotonicity of Boolean functions must have query complexity $\Omega(n^{1/2-c})$. This improves the $\tilde\Omega(n^{1/3})$ lower bound of [CWX17] and…
The main problem in the area of graph property testing is to understand which graph properties are \emph{testable}, which means that with constantly many queries to any input graph $G$, a tester can decide with good probability whether $G$…
We study the problem of testing discrete distributions with a focus on the high probability regime. Specifically, given samples from one or more discrete distributions, a property $\mathcal{P}$, and parameters $0< \epsilon, \delta <1$, we…
In a celebrated work, Blais, Brody, and Matulef developed a technique for proving property testing lower bounds via reductions from communication complexity. Their work focused on testing properties of functions, and yielded new lower…
We present a new inductive rule for verifying lower bounds on expected values of random variables after execution of probabilistic loops as well as on their expected runtimes. Our rule is simple in the sense that loop body semantics need to…
We initiate a study of algorithms with a focus on the computational complexity of individual elements, and introduce the fragile complexity of comparison-based algorithms as the maximal number of comparisons any individual element takes…
Sensitivity, certificate complexity and block sensitivity are widely used Boolean function complexity measures. A longstanding open problem, proposed by Nisan and Szegedy, is whether sensitivity and block sensitivity are polynomially…
Concurrent accesses to databases are typically encapsulated in transactions in order to enable isolation from other concurrent computations and resilience to failures. Modern databases provide transactions with various semantics…
Several recent works [DHLNSY25, CPPS25a, CPPS25b] have studied a model of property testing of Boolean functions under a \emph{relative-error} criterion. In this model, the distance from a target function $f: \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ that is…
In this paper, two new classes of lower bounds on the probability of error for $m$-ary hypothesis testing are proposed. Computation of the minimum probability of error which is attained by the maximum a-posteriori probability (MAP)…
We use critical block sensitivity, a new complexity measure introduced by Huynh and Nordstr\"om (STOC 2012), to study the communication complexity of search problems. To begin, we give a simple new proof of the following central result of…