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We investigate the value of parallel repetition of one-round games with any number of players $kge 2$. It has been an open question whether an analogue of Razs Parallel Repetition Theorem holds for games with more than two players, i.e., whether the value of the repeated game decays exponentially with the number of repetitions. Verbitsky has shown, via a reduction to the density Hales-Jewett theorem, that the value of the repeated game must approach zero, as the number of repetitions increases. However, the rate of decay obtained in this way is extremely slow, and it is an open question whether the true rate is exponential as is the case for all two-player games. Exponential decay bounds are known for several special cases of multi-player games, e.g., free games and anchored games. In this work, we identify a certain expansion property of the base game and show all games with this property satisfy an exponential decay parallel repetition bound. Free games and anchored games satisfy this expansion property, and thus our parallel repetition theorem reproduces all earlier exponential-decay bounds for multiplayer games. More generally, our parallel repetition bound applies to all multiplayer games that are connected in a certain sense. We also describe a very simple game, called the GHZ game, that does not satisfy this connectivity property, and for which we do not know an exponential decay bound. We suspect that progress on bounding the value of this the parallel repetition of the GHZ game will lead to further progress on the general question.
We prove that a sufficiently strong parallel repetition theorem for a special case of multiplayer (multiprover) games implies super-linear lower bounds for multi-tape Turing machines with advice. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first connection between parallel repetition and lower bounds for time complexity and the first major potential implication of a parallel repetition theorem with more than two players. Along the way to proving this result, we define and initiate a study of block rigidity, a weakening of Valiants notion of rigidity. While rigidity was originally defined for matrices, or, equivalently, for (multi-output) linear functions, we extend and study both rigidity and block rigidity for general (multi-output) functions. Using techniques of Paul, Pippenger, Szemeredi and Trotter, we show that a block-rigid function cannot be computed by multi-tape Turing machines that run in linear (or slightly super-linear) time, even in the non-uniform setting, where the machine gets an arbitrary advice tape. We then describe a class of multiplayer games, such that, a sufficiently strong parallel repetition theorem for that class of games implies an explicit block-rigid function. The games in that class have the following property that may be of independent interest: for every random string for the verifier (which, in particular, determines the vector of queries to the players), there is a unique correct answer for each of the players, and the verifier accepts if and only if all answers are correct. We refer to such games as independent games. The theorem that we need is that parallel repetition reduces the value of games in this class from $v$ to $v^{Omega(n)}$, where $n$ is the number of repetitions. As another application of block rigidity, we show conditional size-depth tradeoffs for boolean circuits, where the gates compute arbitrary functions over large sets.
We introduce a simple transformation on two-player nonlocal games, called anchoring, and prove an exponential-decay parallel repetition theorem for all anchored games in the setting of quantum entangled players. This transformation is inspired in part by the Feige-Kilian transformation (SICOMP 2000), and has the property that if the quantum value of the original game $G$ is $v$ then the quantum value of the anchored game $G_bot$ is $1 - (1 - alpha)^2 cdot (1 - v)$ where $alpha$ is a parameter of the transformation. In particular the anchored game has quantum value $1$ if and only if the original game $G$ has quantum value $1$. This provides the first gap amplification technique for general two-player nonlocal games that achieves exponential decay of the quantum value.
We give a new proof of the fact that the parallel repetition of the (3-player) GHZ game reduces the value of the game to zero polynomially quickly. That is, we show that the value of the $n$-fold GHZ game is at most $n^{-Omega(1)}$. This was first established by Holmgren and Raz [HR20]. We present a new proof of this theorem that we believe to be simpler and more direct. Unlike most previous works on parallel repetition, our proof makes no use of information theory, and relies on the use of Fourier analysis. The GHZ game [GHZ89] has played a foundational role in the understanding of quantum information theory, due in part to the fact that quantum strategies can win the GHZ game with probability 1. It is possible that improved parallel repetition bounds may find applications in this setting. Recently, Dinur, Harsha, Venkat, and Yuen [DHVY17] highlighted the GHZ game as a simple three-player game, which is in some sense maximally far from the class of multi-player games whose behavior under parallel repetition is well understood. Dinur et al. conjectured that parallel repetition decreases the value of the GHZ game exponentially quickly, and speculated that progress on proving this would shed light on parallel repetition for general multi-player (multi-prover) games.
The behavior of games repeated in parallel, when played with quantumly entangled players, has received much attention in recent years. Quantum analogues of Razs classical parallel repetition theorem have been proved for many special classes of games. However, for general entangled games no parallel repetition theorem was known. We prove that the entangled value of a two-player game $G$ repeated $n$ times in parallel is at most $c_G n^{-1/4} log n$ for a constant $c_G$ depending on $G$, provided that the entangled value of $G$ is less than 1. In particular, this gives the first proof that the entangled value of a parallel repeated game must converge to 0 for all games whose entangled value is less than 1. Central to our proof is a combination of both classical and quantum correlated sampling.
We show a parallel repetition theorem for the entangled value $omega^*(G)$ of any two-player one-round game $G$ where the questions $(x,y) in mathcal{X}timesmathcal{Y}$ to Alice and Bob are drawn from a product distribution on $mathcal{X}timesmathcal{Y}$. We show that for the $k$-fold product $G^k$ of the game $G$ (which represents the game $G$ played in parallel $k$ times independently), $ omega^*(G^k) =left(1-(1-omega^*(G))^3right)^{Omegaleft(frac{k}{log(|mathcal{A}| cdot |mathcal{B}|)}right)} $, where $mathcal{A}$ and $mathcal{B}$ represent the sets from which the answers of Alice and Bob are drawn.