Relative-error testing of conjunctions and decision lists
Abstract
We study the relative-error property testing model for Boolean functions that was recently introduced in the work of Chen et al. (SODA 2025). In relative-error testing, the testing algorithm gets uniform random satisfying assignments as well as black-box queries to , and it must accept with high probability whenever has the property that is being tested and reject any that is relative-error far from having the property. Here the relative-error distance from to a function is measured with respect to rather than with respect to the entire domain size as in the Hamming distance measure that is used in the standard model; thus, unlike the standard model, relative-error testing allows us to study the testability of sparse Boolean functions that have few satisfying assignments. It was shown in Chen et al. (SODA 2025) that relative-error testing is at least as difficult as standard-model property testing, but for many natural and important Boolean function classes the precise relationship between the two notions is unknown. In this paper we consider the well-studied and fundamental properties of being a conjunction and being a decision list. In the relative-error setting, we give an efficient one-sided error tester for conjunctions with running time and query complexity . Secondly, we give a two-sided relative-error tester for decision lists, matching the query complexity of the state-of-the-art algorithm in the standard model Bshouty (RANDOM 2020) and Diakonikolas et al. (FOCS 2007).
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.08987,
title = {Relative-error testing of conjunctions and decision lists},
author = {Xi Chen and William Pires and Toniann Pitassi and Rocco A. Servedio},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.08987},
year = {2025}
}