Related papers: Depth Lower Bounds against Circuits with Sparse Or…
Proving formula depth lower bounds is a fundamental challenge in complexity theory, with the strongest known bound of $(3 - o(1))\log n$ established by Hastad over 25 years ago. The Karchmer-Raz-Wigderson (KRW) conjecture offers a promising…
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…
Let $U_{k,N}$ denote the Boolean function which takes as input $k$ strings of $N$ bits each, representing $k$ numbers $a^{(1)},\dots,a^{(k)}$ in $\{0,1,\dots,2^{N}-1\}$, and outputs 1 if and only if $a^{(1)} + \cdots + a^{(k)} \geq 2^N.$…
The threshold degree of a Boolean function $f\colon\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}$ is the minimum degree of a real polynomial $p$ that represents $f$ in sign: $\mathrm{sgn}\; p(x)=(-1)^{f(x)}.$ A related notion is sign-rank, defined for a Boolean…
We introduce the polynomial coefficient matrix and identify maximum rank of this matrix under variable substitution as a complexity measure for multivariate polynomials. We use our techniques to prove super-polynomial lower bounds against…
The paper proposes an implicit (i.e., machine-independent) complexity approach to studying computation by polynomial-size, constant-depth circuits with gates counting modulo a constant through the lens of discrete ordinary differential…
Let $ACC \circ THR$ be the class of constant-depth circuits comprised of AND, OR, and MOD$m$ gates (for some constant $m > 1$), with a bottom layer of gates computing arbitrary linear threshold functions. This class of circuits can be seen…
We develop a new technique for constructing sparse graphs that allow us to prove near-linear lower bounds on the round complexity of computing distances in the CONGEST model. Specifically, we show an $\widetilde{\Omega}(n)$ lower bound for…
We reduce the problem of proving deterministic and nondeterministic Boolean circuit size lower bounds to the analysis of certain two-dimensional combinatorial cover problems. This is obtained by combining results of Razborov (1989),…
We provide an $\Omega(log(n))$ lower bound for the depth of any quantum circuit generating the unique groundstate of Kitaev's spherical code. No circuit-depth lower bound was known before on this code in the general case where the gates can…
In this note, we propose a framework for proving computational lower bounds in norm approximation by leveraging a reverse detection--estimation gap. The starting point is a testing problem together with an estimator whose error is…
In this paper we give a characterization of both Boolean and arithmetic circuit classes of logarithmic depth in the vein of descriptive complexity theory, i.e., the Boolean classes $\textrm{NC}^1$, $\textrm{SAC}^1$ and $\textrm{AC}^1$ as…
We investigate monotone circuits with local oracles [K., 2016], i.e., circuits containing additional inputs $y_i = y_i(\vec{x})$ that can perform unstructured computations on the input string $\vec{x}$. Let $\mu \in [0,1]$ be the locality…
We prove a \emph{query complexity} lower bound on rank-one principal component analysis (PCA). We consider an oracle model where, given a symmetric matrix $M \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$, an algorithm is allowed to make $T$ \emph{exact}…
Neural gates compute functions based on weighted sums of the input variables. The expressive power of neural gates (number of distinct functions it can compute) depends on the weight sizes and, in general, large weights (exponential in the…
Tavenas has recently proved that any n^{O(1)}-variate and degree n polynomial in VP can be computed by a depth-4 circuit of size 2^{O(\sqrt{n}\log n)}. So to prove VP not equal to VNP, it is sufficient to show that an explicit polynomial in…
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…
We establish new upper and lower bounds on the number of queries required to test convexity of functions over various discrete domains. 1. We provide a simplified version of the non-adaptive convexity tester on the line. We re-prove the…
We show how to distinguish circuits with $\log k$ negations (a.k.a $k$-monotone functions) from uniformly random functions in $\exp\left(\tilde{O}\left(n^{1/3}k^{2/3}\right)\right)$ time using random samples. The previous best…
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…