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A Technique for Hardness Amplification Against AC⁰

Author William M. Hoza

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William M. Hoza
  • Department of Computer Science, The University of Chicago, IL, USA

Funding

Part of this work was done while the author was visiting the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

Acknowledgements

I thank Avishay Tal for collaboration at an early stage of this project. I thank Li-Yang Tan for encouragement. I thank Pooya Hatami for a helpful conversation.

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William M. Hoza. A Technique for Hardness Amplification Against AC⁰. In 39th Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 300, pp. 1:1-1:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2024.1

Abstract

We study hardness amplification in the context of two well-known "moderate" average-case hardness results for AC⁰ circuits. First, we investigate the extent to which AC⁰ circuits of depth d can approximate AC⁰ circuits of some larger depth d + k. The case k = 1 is resolved by Håstad, Rossman, Servedio, and Tan’s celebrated average-case depth hierarchy theorem (JACM 2017). Our contribution is a significantly stronger correlation bound when k ≥ 3. Specifically, we show that there exists a linear-size AC⁰_{d + k} circuit h : {0, 1}ⁿ → {0, 1} such that for every AC⁰_d circuit g, either g has size exp(n^{Ω(1/d)}), or else g agrees with h on at most a (1/2 + ε)-fraction of inputs where ε = exp(-(1/d) ⋅ Ω(log n)^{k-1}). For comparison, Håstad, Rossman, Servedio, and Tan’s result has ε = n^{-Θ(1/d)}. Second, we consider the majority function. It is well known that the majority function is moderately hard for AC⁰ circuits (and stronger classes). Our contribution is a stronger correlation bound for the XOR of t copies of the n-bit majority function, denoted MAJ_n^{⊕ t}. We show that if g is an AC⁰_d circuit of size S, then g agrees with MAJ_n^{⊕ t} on at most a (1/2 + ε)-fraction of inputs, where ε = (O(log S)^{d - 1} / √n)^t. To prove these results, we develop a hardness amplification technique that is tailored to a specific type of circuit lower bound proof. In particular, one way to show that a function h is moderately hard for AC⁰ circuits is to (a) design some distribution over random restrictions or random projections, (b) show that AC⁰ circuits simplify to shallow decision trees under these restrictions/projections, and finally (c) show that after applying the restriction/projection, h is moderately hard for shallow decision trees with respect to an appropriate distribution. We show that (roughly speaking) if h can be proven to be moderately hard by a proof with that structure, then XORing multiple copies of h amplifies its hardness. Our analysis involves a new kind of XOR lemma for decision trees, which might be of independent interest.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Circuit complexity
Keywords
  • Bounded-depth circuits
  • average-case lower bounds
  • hardness amplification
  • XOR lemmas

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