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Separation of AC^0[oplus] Formulas and Circuits Rossman, Benjamin Srinivasan, Srikanth circuit complexity lower bounds approximate majority polynomial method This paper gives the first separation between the power of formulas and circuits of equal depth in the AC^0[\oplus] basis (unbounded fan-in AND, OR, NOT and MOD_2 gates). We show, for all d(n) <= O(log n/log log n), that there exist polynomial-size depth-d circuits that are not equivalent to depth-d formulas of size n^{o(d)} (moreover, this is optimal in that n^{o(d)} cannot be improved to n^{O(d)}). This result is obtained by a combination of new lower and upper bounds for Approximate Majorities, the class of Boolean functions {0,1}^n to {0,1} that agree with the Majority function on 3/4 fraction of inputs. AC^0[\oplus] formula lower bound. We show that every depth-d AC^0[\oplus] formula of size s has a (1/8)-error polynomial approximation over F_2 of degree O((log s)/d)^{d-1}. This strengthens a classic $O(log s)^{d-1}$ degree approximation for circuits due to Razborov. Since the Majority function has approximate degree Theta(\sqrt n), this result implies an \exp(\Omega(dn^{1/2(d-1)})) lower bound on the depth-d AC^0[\oplus] formula size of all Approximate Majority functions for all d(n) <= O(log n). Monotone AC^0 circuit upper bound. For all d(n) <= O(log n/log log n), we give a randomized construction of depth-d monotone AC^0 circuits (without NOT or MOD_2 gates) of size \exp(O(n^{1/2(d-1)}))} that compute an Approximate Majority function. This strengthens a construction of formulas of size \exp(O(dn^{1/2(d-1)})) due to Amano. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Benjamin Rossman and Srikanth Srinivasan 2017 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 80, 44th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2017) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2017.50 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-73904 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2017.50 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode