Related papers: Conditional Complexity Hardness: Monotone Circuit …
In this paper, we consider bounded width circuits and nondeterministic circuits in three somewhat new directions. In the first part of this paper, we mainly consider bounded width circuits. The main purpose of this part is to prove that…
Proving that there are problems in $\mathsf{P}^\mathsf{NP}$ that require boolean circuits of super-linear size is a major frontier in complexity theory. While such lower bounds are known for larger complexity classes, existing results only…
The problem of constructing hazard-free Boolean circuits dates back to the 1940s and is an important problem in circuit design. Our main lower-bound result unconditionally shows the existence of functions whose circuit complexity is…
The field of fine-grained complexity aims at proving conditional lower bounds on the time complexity of computational problems. One of the most popular assumptions, Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH), implies that SAT cannot be…
We prove lower bounds for the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) in the Sum-of-Squares (SoS) proof system. Our main result is that for every Boolean function $f: \{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$, SoS requires degree $\Omega(s^{1-\epsilon})$…
Circuit lower bounds are important since it is believed that a super-polynomial circuit lower bound for a problem in NP implies that P!=NP. Razborov has proved superpolynomial lower bounds for monotone circuits by using method of…
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…
We show that tools from circuit complexity can be used to study decompositions of global constraints. In particular, we study decompositions of global constraints into conjunctive normal form with the property that unit propagation on the…
Nondeterministic circuits are a nondeterministic computation model in circuit complexity theory. In this paper, we prove a $3(n-1)$ lower bound for the size of nondeterministic $U_2$-circuits computing the parity function. It is known that…
We prove the first unconditional consistency result for superpolynomial circuit lower bounds with a relatively strong theory of bounded arithmetic. Namely, we show that the theory V$^0_2$ is consistent with the conjecture that NEXP…
We continue the program of proving circuit lower bounds via circuit satisfiability algorithms. So far, this program has yielded several concrete results, proving that functions in $\text{Quasi-NP} = \text{NTIME}[n^{(\log n)^{O(1)}}]$ and…
The celebrated result of Kabanets and Impagliazzo (Computational Complexity, 2004) showed that PIT algorithms imply circuit lower bounds, and vice versa. Since then it has been a major challenge to understand the precise connections between…
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…
We show that there is a language in $\mathsf{S}_2\mathsf{E}/_1$ (symmetric exponential time with one bit of advice) with circuit complexity at least $2^n/n$. In particular, the above also implies the same near-maximum circuit lower bounds…
We show that every algorithm for testing $n$-variate Boolean functions for monotonicity must have query complexity $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{1/4})$. All previous lower bounds for this problem were designed for non-adaptive algorithms and, as a…
We study the power of negation in the Boolean and algebraic settings and show the following results. * We construct a family of polynomials $P_n$ in $n$ variables, all of whose monomials have positive coefficients, such that $P_n$ can be…
The best known size lower bounds against unrestricted circuits have remained around $3n$ for several decades. Moreover, the only known technique for proving lower bounds in this model, gate elimination, is inherently limited to proving…
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…
In this paper, we initiate study of the computational power of adaptive and non-adaptive monotone decision trees - decision trees where each query is a monotone function on the input bits. In the most general setting, the monotone decision…
We study depth lower bounds against non-monotone circuits, parametrized by a new measure of non-monotonicity: the orientation of a function $f$ is the characteristic vector of the minimum sized set of negated variables needed in any…