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A seminal result of Nisan and Szegedy (STOC, 1992) shows that for any total Boolean function, the degree of the real polynomial that computes the function, and the minimal degree of a real polynomial that point-wise approximates the…
An open problem that is widely regarded as one of the most important in quantum query complexity is to resolve the quantum query complexity of the k-distinctness function on inputs of size N. While the case of k=2 (also called Element…
We reprove that the approximate degree of the OR function on n bits is Omega(sqrt(n)). We consider a linear program which is feasible if and only if there is an approximate polynomial for a given function, and apply the duality theory. The…
We establish a generic form of hardness amplification for the approximability of constant-depth Boolean circuits by polynomials. Specifically, we show that if a Boolean circuit cannot be pointwise approximated by low-degree polynomials to…
Let $\mathscr{F}_{n,d}$ be the class of all functions $f:\{-1,1\}^n\to[-1,1]$ on the $n$-dimensional discrete hypercube of degree at most $d$. In the first part of this paper, we prove that any (deterministic or randomized) algorithm which…
The best uniform polynomial approximation of the checkmark function $f(x)=|x-\alpha |$ is considered, as $\alpha$ varies in $(-1,1)$. For each fixed degree $n$, the minimax error $E_n (\alpha)$ is shown to be piecewise analytic in $\alpha$.…
The probabilistic degree of a Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}$ is defined to be the smallest $d$ such that there is a random polynomial $\mathbf{P}$ of degree at most $d$ that agrees with $f$ at each point with high…
Let $g: \{-1,1\}^k \to \{-1,1\}$ be any Boolean function and $q_1,\dots,q_k$ be any degree-2 polynomials over $\{-1,1\}^n.$ We give a \emph{deterministic} algorithm which, given as input explicit descriptions of $g,q_1,\dots,q_k$ and an…
A deep approximation is an approximating function defined by composing more than one layer of simple functions. We study deep approximations of functions of one variable using layers consisting of low-degree polynomials or simple conformal…
In this paper we study the separation between two complexity measures: the degree of a Boolean function as a polynomial over the reals and its block sensitivity. We show that separation between these two measures can be improved from $…
We give a "regularity lemma" for degree-d polynomial threshold functions (PTFs) over the Boolean cube {-1,1}^n. This result shows that every degree-d PTF can be decomposed into a constant number of subfunctions such that almost all of the…
For a polynomial f: {-1, 1}^n --> C, we define the partition function as the average of e^{lambda f(x)} over all points x in {-1, 1}^n, where lambda in C is a parameter. We present a quasi-polynomial algorithm, which, given such f, lambda…
The sensitivity of a Boolean function f is the maximum over all inputs x, of the number of sensitive coordinates of x. The well-known sensitivity conjecture of Nisan (see also Nisan and Szegedy) states that every sensitivity-s Boolean…
Determining the approximate degree composition for Boolean functions remains a significant unsolved problem in Boolean function complexity. In recent decades, researchers have concentrated on proving that approximate degree composes for…
We establish an explicit link between depth-3 formulas and one-sided approximation by depth-2 formulas, which were previously studied independently. Specifically, we show that the minimum size of depth-3 formulas is (up to a factor of n)…
We study a natural complexity measure of Boolean functions known as the rational degree. Denoted $\textrm{rdeg}(f)$, it is the minimal degree of a rational function that is equal to $f$ on the Boolean hypercube. For total functions $f$, it…
We prove various theorems on approximation using polynomials with integer coefficients in the Bernstein basis of any given order. In the extreme, we draw the coefficients from $\{ \pm 1\}$ only. A basic case of our results states that for…
Polynomial representations of Boolean functions over various rings such as $\mathbb{Z}$ and $\mathbb{Z}_m$ have been studied since Minsky and Papert (1969). From then on, they have been employed in a large variety of fields including…
Submodular and fractionally subadditive (or equivalently XOS) functions play a fundamental role in combinatorial optimization, algorithmic game theory and machine learning. Motivated by learnability of these classes of functions from random…
We give two approximation algorithms solving the Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation (SBFE) problem for symmetric Boolean functions. The first is an $O(\log n)$-approximation algorithm, based on the submodular goal-value approach of…