No Arabic abstract
Robust sunflowers are a generalization of combinatorial sunflowers that have applications in monotone circuit complexity, DNF sparsification, randomness extractors, and recent advances on the ErdH{o}s-Rado sunflower conjecture. The recent breakthrough of Alweiss, Lovett, Wu and Zhang gives an improved bound on the maximum size of a $w$-set system that excludes a robust sunflower. In this paper, we use this result to obtain an $exp(n^{1/2-o(1)})$ lower bound on the monotone circuit size of an explicit $n$-variate monotone function, improving the previous best known $exp(n^{1/3-o(1)})$ due to Andreev and Harnik and Raz. We also show an $exp(Omega(n))$ lower bound on the monotone arithmetic circuit size of a related polynomial. Finally, we introduce a notion of robust clique-sunflowers and use this to prove an $n^{Omega(k)}$ lower bound on the monotone circuit size of the CLIQUE function for all $k le n^{1/3-o(1)}$, strengthening the bound of Alon and Boppana.
We show that every construction of one-time signature schemes from a random oracle achieves black-box security at most $2^{(1+o(1))q}$, where $q$ is the total number of oracle queries asked by the key generation, signing, and verification algorithms. That is, any such scheme can be broken with probability close to $1$ by a (computationally unbounded) adversary making $2^{(1+o(1))q}$ queries to the oracle. This is tight up to a constant factor in the number of queries, since a simple modification of Lamports one-time signatures (Lamport 79) achieves $2^{(0.812-o(1))q}$ black-box security using $q$ queries to the oracle. Our result extends (with a loss of a constant factor in the number of queries) also to the random permutation and ideal-cipher oracles. Since the symmetric primitives (e.g. block ciphers, hash functions, and message authentication codes) can be constructed by a constant number of queries to the mentioned oracles, as corollary we get lower bounds on the efficiency of signature schemes from symmetric primitives when the construction is black-box. This can be taken as evidence of an inherent efficiency gap between signature schemes and symmetric primitives.
We prove that for every $epsilon>0$ and predicate $P:{0,1}^krightarrow {0,1}$ that supports a pairwise independent distribution, there exists an instance $mathcal{I}$ of the $mathsf{Max}P$ constraint satisfaction problem on $n$ variables such that no assignment can satisfy more than a $tfrac{|P^{-1}(1)|}{2^k}+epsilon$ fraction of $mathcal{I}$s constraints but the degree $Omega(n)$ Sum of Squares semidefinite programming hierarchy cannot certify that $mathcal{I}$ is unsatisfiable. Similar results were previously only known for weaker hierarchies.
We construct an explicit family of 3XOR instances which is hard for $O(sqrt{log n})$ levels of the Sum-of-Squares hierarchy. In contrast to earlier constructions, which involve a random component, our systems can be constructed explicitly in deterministic polynomial time. Our construction is based on the high-dimensional expanders devised by Lubotzky, Samuels and Vishne, known as LSV complexes or Ramanujan complexes, and our analysis is based on two notions of expansion for these complexes: cosystolic expansion, and a local isoperimetric inequality due to Gromov. Our construction offers an interesting contrast to the recent work of Alev, Jeronimo and the last author~(FOCS 2019). They showed that 3XOR instances in which the variables correspond to vertices in a high-dimensional expander are easy to solve. In contrast, in our instances the variables correspond to the edges of the complex.
In this paper we give lower bounds for the representation of real univariate polynomials as sums of powers of degree 1 polynomials. We present two families of polynomials of degree d such that the number of powers that are required in such a representation must be at least of order d. This is clearly optimal up to a constant factor. Previous lower bounds for this problem were only of order $Omega$($sqrt$ d), and were obtained from arguments based on Wronskian determinants and shifted derivatives. We obtain this improvement thanks to a new lower bound method based on Birkhoff interpolation (also known as lacunary polynomial interpolation).
We demonstrate a lower bound technique for linear decision lists, which are decision lists where the queries are arbitrary linear threshold functions. We use this technique to prove an explicit lower bound by showing that any linear decision list computing the function $MAJ circ XOR$ requires size $2^{0.18 n}$. This completely answers an open question of Tur{a}n and Vatan [FoCM97]. We also show that the spectral classes $PL_1, PL_infty$, and the polynomial threshold function classes $widehat{PT}_1, PT_1$, are incomparable to linear decision lists.