English

Tight Correlation Bounds for Circuits Between AC0 and TC0

Computational Complexity 2023-05-23 v2

Abstract

We initiate the study of generalized AC0 circuits comprised of negations and arbitrary unbounded fan-in gates that only need to be constant over inputs of Hamming weight k\ge k, which we denote GC0(k)(k). The gate set of this class includes biased LTFs like the kk-OROR (output 11 iff k\ge k bits are 1) and kk-ANDAND (output 00 iff k\ge k bits are 0), and thus can be seen as an interpolation between AC0 and TC0. We establish a tight multi-switching lemma for GC0(k)(k) circuits, which bounds the probability that several depth-2 GC0(k)(k) circuits do not simultaneously simplify under a random restriction. We also establish a new depth reduction lemma such that coupled with our multi-switching lemma, we can show many results obtained from the multi-switching lemma for depth-dd size-ss AC0 circuits lifts to depth-dd size-s.99s^{.99} GC0(.01logs)(.01\log s) circuits with no loss in parameters (other than hidden constants). Our result has the following applications: 1.Size-2Ω(n1/d)2^{\Omega(n^{1/d})} depth-dd GC0(Ω(n1/d))(\Omega(n^{1/d})) circuits do not correlate with parity (extending a result of H{\aa}stad (SICOMP, 2014)). 2. Size-nΩ(logn)n^{\Omega(\log n)} GC0(Ω(log2n))(\Omega(\log^2 n)) circuits with n.249n^{.249} arbitrary threshold gates or n.499n^{.499} arbitrary symmetric gates exhibit exponentially small correlation against an explicit function (extending a result of Tan and Servedio (RANDOM, 2019)). 3. There is a seed length O((logm)d1log(m/ε)loglog(m))O((\log m)^{d-1}\log(m/\varepsilon)\log\log(m)) pseudorandom generator against size-mm depth-dd GC0(logm)(\log m) circuits, matching the AC0 lower bound of H{\aa}stad stad up to a loglogm\log\log m factor (extending a result of Lyu (CCC, 2022)). 4. Size-mm GC0(logm)(\log m) circuits have exponentially small Fourier tails (extending a result of Tal (CCC, 2017)).

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.02770,
  title  = {Tight Correlation Bounds for Circuits Between AC0 and TC0},
  author = {Vinayak M. Kumar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.02770},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

43 pages; improved presentation and layout, added circuit constructions matching lower bounds

R2 v1 2026-06-28T09:51:55.232Z