In this paper, we use resource-bounded dimension theory to investigate polynomial size circuits. We show that for every $i\geq 0$, $\Ppoly$ has $i$th order scaled $\pthree$-strong dimension 0. We also show that $\Ppoly^\io$ has $\pthree$-dimension 1/2, $\pthree$-strong dimension 1. Our results improve previous measure results of Lutz (1992) and dimension results of Hitchcock and Vinodchandran (2004).
We note that for each k \in {0,1,2, ...} the following holds: NE has (nonuniform) ACC^k circuits if and only if NE has P^{NE}-uniform ACC^k circuits. And we mention how to get analogous results for other circuit and complexity classes.
We investigate the power of non-deterministic circuits over restricted sets of base gates. We note that the power of non-deterministic circuits exhibit a dichotomy, in the following sense: For weak enough bases, non-deterministic circuits are no more powerful than deterministic circuits, and for the remaining bases, non-deterministic circuits are super polynomial more efficient than deterministic circuits (under the assumption that $P/poly \neq NP/poly$). Moreover, we give a precise characterization of the borderline between the two situations.
Assuming the Generalised Riemann Hypothesis (GRH), we show that for all k, there exist polynomials with coefficients in $\MA$ having no arithmetic circuits of size O(n^k) over the complex field (allowing any complex constant). We also build a family of polynomials that can be evaluated in AM having no arithmetic circuits of size O(n^k). Then we investigate the link between fixed-polynomial size circuit bounds in the Boolean and arithmetic settings. In characteristic zero, it is proved that $\NP \not\subset \size(n^k)$, or $\MA \subset \size(n^k)$, or NP=MA imply lower bounds on the circuit siz…
We show that derandomizing polynomial identity testing over an arbitrary finite field implies that NEXP does not have polynomial size boolean circuits. In other words, for any finite field F(q) of size q, $PIT_q\in NSUBEXP\Rightarrow NEXP\not\subseteq P/poly$, where $PIT_q$ is the polynomial identity testing problem over F(q), and NSUBEXP is the nondeterministic subexpoential time class of languages. Our result is in contract to Kabanets and Impagliazzo's existing theorem that derandomizing the polynomial identity testing in the integer ring Z implies that NEXP does have polynomial size boolea…
This paper aims to present an advanced version of PP-hardness proof of Minesweeper by Bondt. The advancement includes improved Minesweeper configurations for 'logic circuits' in a hexagonal Minesweeper. To do so, I demonstrate logical uncertainty in Minesweeper, which ironically allows a possibility to make some Boolean operators. The fact that existing hexagonal logic circuits did not clearly distinguish the true and false signal needs an improved form of a hexagonal wire. I introduce new forms of logic circuits such as NOT, AND, OR gates, a curve and a splitter of wires. Moreover, these new …
In this work we resolve conjectures of Beecken, Mitmann and Saxena [BMS13] and Gupta [Gup14], by proving an analog of a theorem of Edelstein and Kelly for quadratic polynomials. As immediate corollary we obtain the first deterministic polynomial time black-box algorithm for testing zeroness of $Σ^{[3]}ΠΣΠ^{[2]}$ circuits.
Let $C$ be a depth-3 arithmetic circuit of size at most $s$, computing a polynomial $ f \in \mathbb{F}[x_1,\ldots, x_n] $ (where $\mathbb{F}$ = $\mathbb{Q}$ or $\mathbb{C}$) and the fan-in of the product gates of $C$ is bounded by $d$. We give a deterministic polynomial identity testing algorithm to check whether $f\equiv 0$ or not in time $ 2^d \text{ poly}(n,s) $.
This text is a development of a preprint of Ankit Gupta. We present an approach for devising a deterministic polynomial time blackbox identity testing (PIT) algorithm for depth-$4$ circuits with bounded top fanin. This approach is similar to Kayal-Shubhangi approach for depth-$3$ circuits. Kayal and Shubhangi based their algorithm on Sylvester-Gallai-type theorem about linear polynomials. We show how it is possible to generalize this approach to depth-$4$ circuits. However we failed to implement this plan completely. We succeeded to construct a polynomial time deterministic algorithm for depth…
In their paper on the "chasm at depth four", Agrawal and Vinay have shown that polynomials in m variables of degree O(m) which admit arithmetic circuits of size 2^o(m) also admit arithmetic circuits of depth four and size 2^o(m). This theorem shows that for problems such as arithmetic circuit lower bounds or black-box derandomization of identity testing, the case of depth four circuits is in a certain sense the general case. In this paper we show that smaller depth four circuits can be obtained if we start from polynomial size arithmetic circuits. For instance, we show that if the permanent of…
The problem of constructing hazard-free Boolean circuits (those avoiding electronic glitches) dates back to the 1940s and is an important problem in circuit design and even in cybersecurity. We show that a DeMorgan circuit is hazard-free if and only if the circuit produces (purely syntactically) all prime implicants as well as all prime implicates of the Boolean function it computes. This extends to arbitrary DeMorgan circuits a classical result of Eichelberger [IBM J. Res. Develop., 9 (1965)] showing this property for special depth-two circuits. Via an amazingly simple proof, we also strength…
In this paper, we study the computational complexity of the commutative determinant polynomial computed by a class of set-multilinear circuits which we call regular set-multilinear circuits. Regular set-multilinear circuits are commutative circuits with a restriction on the order in which they can compute polynomials. A regular circuit can be seen as the commutative analogue of the ordered circuit defined by Hrubes,Wigderson and Yehudayoff [HWY10]. We show that if the commutative determinant polynomial has small representation in the sum of constantly many regular set-multilinear circuits, the…
We study the class of non-commutative Unambiguous circuits or Unique-Parse-Tree (UPT) circuits, and a related model of Few-Parse-Trees (FewPT) circuits (which were recently introduced by Lagarde, Malod and Perifel [LMP16] and Lagarde, Limaye and Srinivasan [LLS17]) and give the following constructions: (1) An explicit hitting set of quasipolynomial size for UPT circuits, (2) An explicit hitting set of quasipolynomial size for FewPT circuits (circuits with constantly many parse tree shapes), (3) An explicit hitting set of polynomial size for UPT circuits (of known parse tree shape), when a para…
Motivated by the Hadamard product of matrices we define the Hadamard product of multivariate polynomials and study its arithmetic circuit and branching program complexity. We also give applications and connections to polynomial identity testing. Our main results are the following. 1. We show that noncommutative polynomial identity testing for algebraic branching programs over rationals is complete for the logspace counting class $\ceql$, and over fields of characteristic $p$ the problem is in $\ModpL/\Poly$. 2.We show an exponential lower bound for expressing the Raz-Yehudayoff polynomial as t…
An efficient randomized polynomial identity test for noncommutative polynomials given by noncommutative arithmetic circuits remains an open problem. The main bottleneck to applying known techniques is that a noncommutative circuit of size $s$ can compute a polynomial of degree exponential in $s$ with a double-exponential number of nonzero monomials. In this paper, we report some progress by dealing with two natural subcases (both allow for polynomials of exponential degree and a double exponential number of monomials): (1) We consider \emph{$+$-regular} noncommutative circuits: these are homog…
We reprove a result of Boppana and Lagarias: If Pi_2^P is different from Sigma_2^P then there exists a partial function f that is computable by a polynomial-size family of circuits, but no inverse of f is computable by a polynomial-size family of circuits. We strengthen this result by showing that there exist length-preserving total functions that are one-way by circuit size and that are computable in uniform polynomial time. We also prove, if Pi_2^P is different from Sigma_2^P, that there exist polynomially balanced total surjective functions that are one-way by circuit size; here non-uniform…
We investigate the complexity of uniform OR circuits and AND circuits of polynomial-size and depth. As their name suggests, OR circuits have OR gates as their computation gates, as well as the usual input, output and constant (0/1) gates. As is the norm for Boolean circuits, our circuits have multiple sink gates, which implies that an OR circuit computes an OR function on some subset of its input variables. Determining that subset amounts to solving a number of reachability questions on a polynomial-size directed graph (which input gates are connected to the output gate?), taken from a very sp…
Proving super-polynomial size lower bounds for $\textsf{TC}^0$, the class of constant-depth, polynomial-size circuits of Majority gates, is a notorious open problem in complexity theory. A major frontier is to prove that $\textsf{NEXP}$ does not have poly-size $\textsf{THR} \circ \textsf{THR}$ circuit (depth-two circuits with linear threshold gates). In recent years, R.~Williams proposed a program to prove circuit lower bounds via improved algorithms. In this paper, following Williams' framework, we show that the above frontier question can be resolved by devising slightly faster algorithms fo…
We study symmetric arithmetic circuits and improve on lower bounds given by Dawar and Wilsenach (ArXiv 2020). Their result showed an exponential lower bound of the permanent computed by symmetric circuits. We extend this result to show a simpler proof of the permanent lower bound and show that a large class of polynomials have exponential lower bounds in this model. In fact, we prove that all polynomials that contain at least one monomial of the permanent have exponential size lower bounds in the symmetric computation model. We also show super-polynomial lower bounds for smaller groups. We sup…
A polynomial identity testing algorithm must determine whether a given input polynomial is identically equal to 0. We give a deterministic black-box identity testing algorithm for univariate polynomials of the form $\sum_{j=0}^t c_j X^{α_j} (a + b X)^{β_j}$. From our algorithm we derive an exponential lower bound for representations of polynomials such as $\prod_{i=1}^{2^n} (X^i-1)$ under this form. It has been conjectured that these polynomials are hard to compute by general arithmetic circuits. Our result shows that the "hardness from derandomization" approach to lower bounds is feasible for…
Polynomial identity testing and arithmetic circuit lower bounds are two central questions in algebraic complexity theory. It is an intriguing fact that these questions are actually related. One of the authors of the present paper has recently proposed a "real τ-conjecture" which is inspired by this connection. The real τ-conjecture states that the number of real roots of a sum of products of sparse univariate polynomials should be polynomially bounded. It implies a superpolynomial lower bound on the size of arithmetic circuits computing the permanent polynomial. In this paper we show that the …
We investigate the power of Algebraic Branching Programs (ABPs) augmented with help polynomials, and constant-depth Boolean circuits augmented with help functions. We relate the problem of proving explicit lower bounds in both these models to the Remote Point Problem (introduced by Alon, Panigrahy, and Yekhanin (RANDOM '09)). More precisely, proving lower bounds for ABPs with help polynomials is related to the Remote Point Problem w.r.t. the rank metric, and for constant-depth circuits with help functions it is related to the Remote Point Problem w.r.t. the Hamming metric. For algebraic branch…
We give several new lower bounds on size of homogeneous non-commutative circuits. We present an explicit homogeneous bivariate polynomial of degree $d$ which requires homogeneous non-commutative circuit of size $Ω(d/\log d)$. For an $n$-variate polynomial with $n>1$, the result can be improved to $Ω(nd)$, if $d\leq n$, or $Ω(nd \frac{\log n}{\log d})$, if $d\geq n$. Under the same assumptions, we also give a quadratic lower bound for the ordered version of the central symmetric polynomial.
In a sequence of seminal results in the 80's, Kaltofen showed that the complexity class VP is closed under taking factors. A natural question in this context is to understand if other natural classes of multivariate polynomials, for instance, arithmetic formulas, algebraic branching programs, bounded depth arithmetic circuits or the class VNP, are closed under taking factors. In this paper, we show that all factors of degree at most $\log^a n$ of polynomials with poly(n) size depth $k$ circuits have poly(n) size circuits of depth at most $O(k + a)$. This partially answers a question of Shpilka…
We consider the complexity of two questions on polynomials given by arithmetic circuits: testing whether a monomial is present and counting the number of monomials. We show that these problems are complete for subclasses of the counting hierarchy which had few or no known natural complete problems. We also study these questions for circuits computing multilinear polynomials.
We say that a circuit $C$ over a field $F$ functionally computes an $n$-variate polynomial $P$ if for every $x \in \{0,1\}^n$ we have that $C(x) = P(x)$. This is in contrast to syntactically computing $P$, when $C \equiv P$ as formal polynomials. In this paper, we study the question of proving lower bounds for homogeneous depth-$3$ and depth-$4$ arithmetic circuits for functional computation. We prove the following results : 1. Exponential lower bounds homogeneous depth-$3$ arithmetic circuits for a polynomial in $VNP$. 2. Exponential lower bounds for homogeneous depth-$4$ arithmetic circuits …
Tavenas has recently proved that any n^{O(1)}-variate and degree n polynomial in VP can be computed by a depth-4 circuit of size 2^{O(\sqrt{n}\log n)}. So to prove VP not equal to VNP, it is sufficient to show that an explicit polynomial in VNP of degree n requires 2^{ω(\sqrt{n}\log n)} size depth-4 circuits. Soon after Tavenas's result, for two different explicit polynomials, depth-4 circuit size lower bounds of 2^{Ω(\sqrt{n}\log n)} have been proved Kayal et al. and Fournier et al. In particular, using combinatorial design Kayal et al.\ construct an explicit polynomial in VNP that requires d…
Comparator circuit model was originally introduced by Mayr and Subramanian (1992) (and further studied by Cook, Filmus and Le (2012)) to capture problems which are not known to be P-complete but still not known to admit efficient parallel algorithms. The class CC is the complexity class of problems many-one logspace reducible to the Comparator Circuit Value Problem and we know that NL is contained in CC which is inturn contained in P. Cook, Filmus and Le (2012) showed that CC is also the class of languages decided by polynomial size comparator circuits. We study generalizations of the comparat…
A $ΣΠΣΠ(k)$ circuit $C=\sum_{i=1}^kF_i=\sum_{i=1}^k\prod_{j=1}^{d_i}f_{ij}$ is unmixed if for each $i\in[k]$, $F_i=f_{i1}(x_1)... f_{in}(x_n)$, where each $f_{ij}$ is a univariate polynomial given in the sparse representation. In this paper, we give a polynomial time black-box algorithm of identity testing for the low degree unmixed $ΣΠΣΠ(k)$ circuits. In order to obtain the black-box algorithm, we first show that a special class of low degree unmixed $ΣΠΣΠ(k)$ circuits of size $s$ is $s^{O(k^2)}$-sparse. Then we construct a hitting set $\mathcal{H}$ in polynomial time for the low degree unmix…
Choiceless Polynomial Time (CPT) is one of the few remaining candidate logics for capturing PTIME. In this paper, we make progress towards separating CPT from polynomial time by firstly establishing a connection between the expressive power of CPT and the existence of certain symmetric circuit families, and secondly, proving lower bounds against these circuits. We focus on the isomorphism problem of unordered Cai-Fürer-Immerman-graphs (the CFI-query) as a potential candidate for separating CPT from P. Results by Dawar, Richerby and Rossman, and subsequently by Pakusa, Schalthöfer and Selman sh…
In this paper we associate to each multivariate polynomial $f$ that is homogeneous relative to a subset of its variables a series of polynomial families $P_λ(f)$ of $m$-tuples of homogeneous polynomials of equal degree such that the circuit size of any member in $P_λ(f)$ is bounded from above by the circuit size of $f$. This provides a method for obtaining lower bounds for the circuit size of $f$ by proving $(s,r)$-(weak) elusiveness of the polynomial mapping associated with $P_λ(f)$. We discuss some algebraic methods for proving the $(s,r)$-(weak) elusiveness. We also improve estimates in the…
Instantaneous quantum polynomial time (IQP) is a model of (probably) non-universal quantum computation. Since it has been proven that IQP circuits are unlikely to be simulated classically up to a multiplicative error and an error in the $l_1$ norm, IQP is considered as one of the promising classes that demonstrates quantum supremacy. Although IQP circuits can be realized more easily than a universal quantum computer, demonstrating quantum supremacy is still difficult. It is therefore desired to find subclasses of IQP that are easy to implement. In this paper, by imposing some restrictions on I…
We give a quantum-inspired $O(n^4)$ algorithm computing the Tutte polynomial of a lattice path matroid, where $n$ is the size of the ground set of the matroid. Furthermore, this can be improved to $O(n^2)$ arithmetic operations if we evaluate the Tutte polynomial on a given input, fixing the values of the variables. The best existing algorithm, found in 2004, was $O(n^5)$, and the problem has only been known to be polynomial time since 2003. Conceptually, our algorithm embeds the computation in a determinant using a recently demonstrated equivalence of categories useful for counting problems s…
We present a classical algorithm that, for any 3D geometrically-local, polylogarithmic-depth quantum circuit $C$ acting on $n$ qubits, and any bit string $x\in\{0,1\}^n$, can compute the quantity $|< x |C|0^{\otimes n}>|^2$ to within any inverse-polynomial additive error in quasi-polynomial time. It is known that it is $\#P$-hard to compute this same quantity to within $2^{-n^2}$ additive error [Mov20, KMM21]. The previous best known algorithm for this problem used $O(2^{n^{1/3}}\text{poly}(1/ε))$ time to compute probabilities to within additive error $ε$ [BGM20]. Notably, the [BGM20] paper in…
Polynomial-Time Classical Simulation of Noisy Quantum Circuits with Naturally Fault-Tolerant Gates
Joint Center for Quantum Information & Computer Science, University of Maryland and NIST（马里兰大学与国家标准与技术研究院量子信息与计算机科学联合中心）；Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland（马里兰大学计算机科学系）；Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, University of California at Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校西蒙斯计算理论研究所）；National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)（国家标准与技术研究院）
Quantum homomorphic encryption (QHE) is an encryption method that allows quantum computation to be performed on one party's private data with the program provided by another party, without revealing much information about the data nor about the program to the opposite party. It is known that information-theoretically-secure QHE for circuits of unrestricted size would require exponential resources, and efficient computationally-secure QHE schemes for polynomial-sized quantum circuits have been constructed. In this paper we first propose a QHE scheme for a type of circuits of polynomial depth, b…
We show that there is a defining equation of degree at most $\mathsf{poly}(n)$ for the (Zariski closure of the) set of the non-rigid matrices: that is, we show that for every large enough field $\mathbb{F}$, there is a non-zero $n^2$-variate polynomial $P \in \mathbb{F}[x_{1, 1}, \ldots, x_{n, n}]$ of degree at most $\mathsf{poly}(n)$ such that every matrix $M$ which can be written as a sum of a matrix of rank at most $n/100$ and a matrix of sparsity at most $n^2/100$ satisfies $P(M) = 0$. This confirms a conjecture of Gesmundo, Hauenstein, Ikenmeyer and Landsberg [GHIL16] and improves the bes…
Various key problems from theoretical computer science can be expressed as polynomial optimization problems over the boolean hypercube. One particularly successful way to prove complexity bounds for these types of problems are based on sums of squares (SOS) as nonnegativity certificates. In this article, we initiate the analysis of optimization problems over the boolean hypercube via a recent, alternative certificate called sums of nonnegative circuit polynomials (SONC). We show that key results for SOS based certificates remain valid: First, for polynomials, which are nonnegative over the $n$…
We introduce a new algebraic proof system, which has tight connections to (algebraic) circuit complexity. In particular, we show that any super-polynomial lower bound on any Boolean tautology in our proof system implies that the permanent does not have polynomial-size algebraic circuits (VNP is not equal to VP). As a corollary to the proof, we also show that super-polynomial lower bounds on the number of lines in Polynomial Calculus proofs (as opposed to the usual measure of number of monomials) imply the Permanent versus Determinant Conjecture. Note that, prior to our work, there was no proof…
In this paper we revisit the classical problem of polynomial interpolation, with a slight twist; namely, polynomial evaluations are available up to a group action of the unit circle on the complex plane. It turns out that this new setting allows for a phaseless recovery of a polynomial in a polynomial time.
We develop efficient randomized algorithms to solve the black-box reconstruction problem for polynomials over finite fields, computable by depth three arithmetic circuits with alternating addition/multiplication gates, such that output gate is an addition gate with in-degree two. These circuits compute polynomials of form $G\times(T_1 + T_2)$, where $G,T_1,T_2$ are product of affine forms, and polynomials $T_1,T_2$ have no common factors. Rank of such a circuit is defined as dimension of vector space spanned by all affine factors of $T_1$ and $T_2$. For any polynomial $f$ computable by such a …
We establish a classical heuristic algorithm for exactly computing quantum probability amplitudes. Our algorithm is based on mapping output probability amplitudes of quantum circuits to evaluations of the Tutte polynomial of graphic matroids. The algorithm evaluates the Tutte polynomial recursively using the deletion-contraction property while attempting to exploit structural properties of the matroid. We consider several variations of our algorithm and present experimental results comparing their performance on two classes of random quantum circuits. Further, we obtain an explicit form for Cl…
A Pfaffian circuit is a tensor contraction network where the edges are labeled with changes of bases in such a way that a very specific set of combinatorial properties are satisfied. By modeling the permissible changes of bases as systems of polynomial equations, and then solving via computation, we are able to identify classes of 0/1 planar #CSP problems solvable in polynomial-time via the Pfaffian circuit evaluation theorem (a variant of L. Valiant's Holant Theorem). We present two different models of 0/1 variables, one that is possible under a homogeneous change of basis, and one that is po…
