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oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:16565 2024-03-06T10:57:48Z ddc:004 open_access

Hitting Sets for Regular Branching Programs Bogdanov, Andrej Hoza, William M. Prakriya, Gautam Pyne, Edward Pseudorandomness hitting set generators space-bounded computation We construct improved hitting set generators (HSGs) for ordered (read-once) regular branching programs in two parameter regimes. First, we construct an explicit ε-HSG for unbounded-width regular branching programs with a single accept state with seed length Õ(log n ⋅ log(1/ε)), where n is the length of the program. Second, we construct an explicit ε-HSG for width-w length-n regular branching programs with seed length Õ(log n ⋅ (√{log(1/ε)} + log w) + log(1/ε)). For context, the "baseline" in this area is the pseudorandom generator (PRG) by Nisan (Combinatorica 1992), which fools ordered (possibly non-regular) branching programs with seed length O(log(wn/ε) ⋅ log n). For regular programs, the state-of-the-art PRG, by Braverman, Rao, Raz, and Yehudayoff (FOCS 2010, SICOMP 2014), has seed length Õ(log(w/ε) ⋅ log n), which beats Nisan’s seed length when log(w/ε) = o(log n). Taken together, our two new constructions beat Nisan’s seed length in all parameter regimes except when log w and log(1/ε) are both Ω(log n) (for the construction of HSGs for regular branching programs with a single accept vertex). Extending work by Reingold, Trevisan, and Vadhan (STOC 2006), we furthermore show that an explicit HSG for regular branching programs with a single accept vertex with seed length o(log² n) in the regime log w = Θ(log(1/ε)) = Θ(log n) would imply improved HSGs for general ordered branching programs, which would be a major breakthrough in derandomization. Pyne and Vadhan (CCC 2021) recently obtained such parameters for the special case of permutation branching programs. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Andrej Bogdanov and William M. Hoza and Gautam Prakriya and Edward Pyne 2022 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 234, 37th Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2022) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2022.3 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-165658 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2022.3 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode