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Black-Box Constructive Proofs Are Unavoidable

Authors Lijie Chen , Ryan Williams , Tianqi Yang

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Author Details

Lijie Chen
  • Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, UC Berkeley, CA, USA
Ryan Williams
  • CSAIL, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
Tianqi Yang
  • IIIS, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Funding

  • Williams, Ryan: Supported by NSF CCF-2127597.

Acknowledgements

We would also like to thank Jiatu Li for discussions during the early stage of this research project and anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Cite As Get BibTex

Lijie Chen, Ryan Williams, and Tianqi Yang. Black-Box Constructive Proofs Are Unavoidable. In 14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 251, pp. 35:1-35:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.35

Abstract

Following Razborov and Rudich, a "natural property" for proving a circuit lower bound satisfies three axioms: constructivity, largeness, and usefulness. In 2013, Williams proved that for any reasonable circuit class C, NEXP ⊂ C is equivalent to the existence of a constructive property useful against C. Here, a property is constructive if it can be decided in poly(N) time, where N = 2ⁿ is the length of the truth-table of the given n-input function.
Recently, Fan, Li, and Yang initiated the study of black-box natural properties, which require a much stronger notion of constructivity, called black-box constructivity: the property should be decidable in randomized polylog(N) time, given oracle access to the n-input function. They showed that most proofs based on random restrictions yield black-box natural properties, and demonstrated limitations on what black-box natural properties can prove. 
In this paper, perhaps surprisingly, we prove that the equivalence of Williams holds even with this stronger notion of black-box constructivity: for any reasonable circuit class C, NEXP ⊂ C is equivalent to the existence of a black-box constructive property useful against C. The main technical ingredient in proving this equivalence is a smooth, strong, and locally-decodable probabilistically checkable proof (PCP), which we construct based on a recent work by Paradise. As a by-product, we show that average-case witness lower bounds for PCP verifiers follow from NEXP lower bounds.
We also show that randomness is essential in the definition of black-box constructivity: we unconditionally prove that there is no deterministic polylog(N)-time constructive property that is useful against even polynomial-size AC⁰ circuits.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Circuit complexity
Keywords
  • Circuit lower bounds
  • natural proofs
  • probabilistic checkable proofs

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