English

Relative-error testing of conjunctions and decision lists

Computational Complexity 2025-04-15 v1 Discrete Mathematics Data Structures and Algorithms

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 ff, and it must accept ff with high probability whenever ff has the property that is being tested and reject any ff that is relative-error far from having the property. Here the relative-error distance from ff to a function gg is measured with respect to f1(1)|f^{-1}(1)| rather than with respect to the entire domain size 2n2^n 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 O(1/ϵ)O(1/\epsilon). Secondly, we give a two-sided relative-error O~\tilde{O}(1/ϵ)(1/\epsilon) 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).

Keywords

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}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:55:34.727Z