Related papers: Negations are powerful even in small depth

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…

One of the major outstanding foundational problems about boolean functions is the sensitivity conjecture, which (in one of its many forms) asserts that the degree of a boolean function (i.e. the minimum degree of a real polynomial that…

Gate elimination is the primary technique for proving explicit lower bounds against general Boolean circuits, including Li and Yang's state-of-the-art $3.1n - o(n)$ bound for affine dispersers (STOC 2022). Every circuit lower bound is…

We show that algebraic formulas and constant-depth circuits are closed under taking factors. In other words, we show that if a multivariate polynomial over a field of characteristic zero has a small constant-depth circuit or formula, then…

One question that we investigate in this paper is, how can we build log-concave polynomials using sparse polynomials as building blocks? More precisely, let $f = \sum\_{i = 0}^d a\_i X^i \in \mathbb{R}^+[X]$ be a polynomial satisfying the…

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…

While on some natural distributions, neural-networks are trained efficiently using gradient-based algorithms, it is known that learning them is computationally hard in the worst-case. To separate hard from easy to learn distributions, we…

This paper proposes new notions of polynomial depth (called monotone poly depth), based on a polynomial version of monotone Kolmogorov complexity. We show that monotone poly depth satisfies all desirable properties of depth notions i.e.,…

We study Boolean circuits as a representation of Boolean functions and consider different equivalence, audit, and enumeration problems. For a number of restricted sets of gate types (bases) we obtain efficient algorithms, while for all…

We formalize a framework of algebraically natural lower bounds for algebraic circuits. Just as with the natural proofs notion of Razborov and Rudich for boolean circuit lower bounds, our notion of algebraically natural lower bounds captures…

We investigate mathematical structures that provide natural semantics for families of (quantified) non-classical logics featuring special unary connectives, known as recovery operators, that allow us to 'recover' the properties of classical…

We consider the problem of finding nearly optimal solutions of optimization problems with random objective functions. Two concrete problems we consider are (a) optimizing the Hamiltonian of a spherical or Ising $p$-spin glass model, and (b)…

A long-investigated problem in circuit complexity theory is to decompose an $n$-input or $n$-variable Majority Boolean function (call it $M_n$) using $k$-input ones ($M_k$), $k < n$, where the objective is to achieve the decomposition using…

We analyze Kumar's recent quadratic algebraic branching program size lower bound proof method (CCC 2017) for the power sum polynomial. We present a refinement of this method that gives better bounds in some cases. The lower bound relies on…

We construct a reduction which proves that the fooling set number and the determinantal rank of a Boolean matrix are NP-hard to compute.

We establish a lower bound for deciding the satisfiability of the conjunction of any two Boolean formulas from a set called a full representation of Boolean functions of $n$ variables - a set containing a Boolean formula to represent each…

We prove nilpotency results for Lie algebras over an arbitrary field admitting a derivation, which satisfies a given polynomial identity $r(t)=0$. For the polynomial $r=t^n-1$ we obtain results on the nilpotency of Lie algebras admitting a…

We show that any $n$-variate polynomial computable by a syntactically multilinear circuit of size $\operatorname{poly}(n)$ can be computed by a depth-$4$ syntactically multilinear ($\Sigma\Pi\Sigma\Pi$) circuit of size at most…

One fundamental goal of high-dimensional statistics is to detect or recover planted structure (such as a low-rank matrix) hidden in noisy data. A growing body of work studies low-degree polynomials as a restricted model of computation for…

We prove strengthened lower bounds for constant-depth set-multilinear formulas. More precisely, we show that over any field, there is an explicit polynomial $f$ in VNP defined over $n^2$ variables, and of degree $n$, such that any…