Randomized Black-Box PIT for Small Depth +-Regular Non-Commutative Circuits

Abstract

In this paper, we address the black-box polynomial identity testing (PIT) problem for non-commutative polynomials computed by +-regular circuits, a class of homogeneous circuits introduced by Arvind, Joglekar, Mukhopadhyay, and Raja (STOC 2017, Theory of Computing 2019). These circuits can compute polynomials with a number of monomials that are doubly exponential in the circuit size. They gave an efficient randomized PIT algorithm for +-regular circuits of depth 3 and posed the problem of developing an efficient black-box PIT for higher depths as an open problem. Our work makes progress on this open problem by resolving it for constant-depth +-regular circuits.
We present a randomized black-box polynomial-time algorithm for +-regular circuits of any constant depth. Specifically, our algorithm runs in s^{O(d²)} time, where s and d represent the size and the depth of the +-regular circuit, respectively. Our approach combines several key techniques in a novel way. We employ a nondeterministic substitution automaton that transforms the polynomial into a structured form and utilizes polynomial sparsification along with commutative transformations to maintain non-zeroness. Additionally, we introduce matrix composition, coefficient modification via the automaton, and multi-entry outputs - methods that have not previously been applied in the context of black-box PIT. Together, these techniques enable us to effectively handle exponential degrees and doubly exponential sparsity in non-commutative settings, enabling polynomial identity testing for higher-depth circuits. In particular, we show that if f is a non-zero non-commutative polynomial in n variables over the field 𝔽, computed by a depth-d +-regular circuit of size s, then f cannot be a polynomial identity for the matrix algebra 𝕄_{N}(𝔽), where N = s^{O(d²)} and the size of the field 𝔽 depends on the degree of f. Interestingly, the size of the matrices does not depend on the degree of f. Our result can be interpreted as an Amitsur-Levitzki-type result [Amitsur and Levitzki, 1950] for polynomials computed by small-depth +-regular circuits.