Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
We give a new lower bound on the query complexity of any non-adaptive algorithm for testing whether an unknown Boolean function is a k-junta versus epsilon-far from every k-junta. Our lower bound is that any non-adaptive algorithm must make Omega(( k * log*(k)) / ( epsilon^c * log(log(k)/epsilon^c))) queries for this testing problem, where c is any absolute constant <1. For suitable values of epsilon this is asymptotically larger than the O(k * log(k) + k/epsilon) query complexity of the best known adaptive algorithm [Blais,STOC'09] for testing juntas, and thus the new lower bound shows that adaptive algorithms are more powerful than non-adaptive algorithms for the junta testing problem.
@InProceedings{servedio_et_al:LIPIcs.CCC.2015.264,
author = {Servedio, Rocco A. and Tan, Li-Yang and Wright, John},
title = {{Adaptivity Helps for Testing Juntas}},
booktitle = {30th Conference on Computational Complexity (CCC 2015)},
pages = {264--279},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-939897-81-1},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2015},
volume = {33},
editor = {Zuckerman, David},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2015.264},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-50663},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2015.264},
annote = {Keywords: Property testing, juntas, adaptivity}
}