Colloquium on Computational Complexity

We show that the Tree Evaluation Problem with alphabet size $k$ and height $h$ can be solved by branching programs of size $k^{O(h/\log h)} + 2^{O(h)}$. This answers a longstanding challenge of Cook et al. (2009) and gives the first general upper bound since the problem's inception.

We study from the proof complexity perspective the (informal) proof search problem: Is there an optimal way to search for propositional proofs? We note that for any fixed proof system there exists a time-optimal proof search algorithm. Using classical proof complexity results about reflection […]

A secret-sharing scheme allows to distribute a secret $s$ among $n$ parties such that only some predefined ``authorized'' sets of parties can reconstruct the secret, and all other ``unauthorized'' sets learn nothing about $s$. The collection of authorized/unauthorized sets can be captured by a […]

Interactive error correcting codes are codes that encode a two party communication protocol to an error-resilient protocol that succeeds even if a constant fraction of the communicated symbols are adversarially corrupted, at the cost of increasing the communication by a constant factor. What is the […]

Motivated in part by applications in lattice-based cryptography, we initiate the study of the size of linear threshold (`$t$-out-of-$n$') secret-sharing where the linear reconstruction function is restricted to coefficients in $\{0,1\}$. We prove upper and lower bounds on the share size of such […]

We call any consistent and sufficiently powerful formal theory that enables to algorithmically in polynomial time verify whether a text is a proof \textbf{efficiently verifiable mathematics} (ev-mathematics). We study the question whether nondeterminism is more powerful than determinism for […]

Three decades ago, Nisan constructed an explicit pseudorandom generator (PRG) that fools width-$n$ length-$n$ read-once branching programs (ROBPs) with error $\varepsilon$ and seed length $O(\log^2 n + \log n \cdot \log(1/\varepsilon))$ (Combinatorica 1992). Nisan's generator remains the best […]

A polynomial threshold function (PTF) $f:\mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is a function of the form $f(x) = sign(p(x))$ where $p$ is a polynomial of degree at most $d$. PTFs are a classical and well-studied complexity class with applications across complexity theory, learning theory, […]

We prove that for every parity decision tree of depth $d$ on $n$ variables, the sum of absolute values of Fourier coefficients at level $\ell$ is at most $d^{\ell/2} \cdot O(\ell \cdot \log(n))^\ell$. Our result is nearly tight for small values of $\ell$ and extends a previous Fourier bound for […]

We give new and efficient black-box reconstruction algorithms for some classes of depth-$3$ arithmetic circuits. As a consequence, we obtain the first efficient algorithm for computing the tensor rank and for finding the optimal tensor decomposition as a sum of rank-one tensors when then input is a […]