Incompressible Functions,Relative-Error Extractors,and the Power of Nondeterministic Reductions

A circuit C compresses a function \({f : \{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}^m}\) if given an input \({x\in \{0,1\}^n}\), the circuit C can shrink x to a shorter ?-bit string x′ such that later, a computationally unbounded solver D will be able to compute f(x) based on x′. In this paper we study the existence of functions which are incompressible by circuits of some fixed polynomial size \({s=n^c}\). Motivated by cryptographic applications, we focus on average-case \({(\ell,\epsilon)}\) incompressibility, which guarantees that on a random input \({x\in \{0,1\}^n}\), for every size s circuit \({C:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}^{\ell}}\) and any unbounded solver D, the success probability \({\Pr_x[D(C(x))=f(x)]}\) is upper-bounded by \({2^{-m}+\epsilon}\). While this notion of incompressibility appeared in several works (e.g., Dubrov and Ishai, STOC 06), so far no explicit constructions of efficiently computable incompressible functions were known. In this work, we present the following results:

1. (1)
   Assuming that E is hard for exponential size nondeterministic circuits, we construct a polynomial time computable boolean function \({f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}}\) which is incompressible by size n ^c circuits with communication \({\ell=(1-o(1)) \cdot n}\) and error \({\epsilon=n^{-c}}\). Our technique generalizes to the case of PRGs against nonboolean circuits, improving and simplifying the previous construction of Shaltiel and Artemenko (STOC 14).
    
2. (2)
   We show that it is possible to achieve negligible error parameter \({\epsilon=n^{-\omega(1)}}\) for nonboolean functions. Specifically, assuming that E is hard for exponential size \({\Sigma_3}\)-circuits, we construct a nonboolean function \({f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}^m}\) which is incompressible by size n ^c circuits with \({\ell=\Omega(n)}\) and extremely small \({\epsilon=n^{-c} \cdot 2^{-m}}\). Our construction combines the techniques of Trevisan and Vadhan (FOCS 00) with a new notion of relative error deterministic extractor which may be of independent interest.
    
3. (3)
   We show that the task of constructing an incompressible boolean function \({f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}}\) with negligible error parameter \({\epsilon}\) cannot be achieved by “existing proof techniques”. Namely, nondeterministic reductions (or even \({\Sigma_i}\) reductions) cannot get \({\epsilon=n^{-\omega(1)}}\) for boolean incompressible functions. Our results also apply to constructions of standard Nisan-Wigderson type PRGs and (standard) boolean functions that are hard on average, explaining, in retrospect, the limitations of existing constructions. Our impossibility result builds on an approach of Shaltiel and Viola (STOC 08).
    

     

Testing list <Emphasis Type="Italic">H</Emphasis>-homomorphisms

In the List H- Homomorphism Problem, for a graph H that is a parameter of the problem, an instance consists of an undirected graph G with a list constraint \({L(v) \subseteq V(H)}\) for each variable \({v \in V(G)}\), and the objective is to determine whether there is a list H-homomorphism \({f:V(G) \to V(H)}\), that is, \({f(v) \in L(v)}\) for every \({v \in V(G)}\) and \({(f(u),f(v)) \in E(H)}\) whenever \({(u,v) \in E(G)}\).We consider the problem of testing list H-homomorphisms in the following weighted setting: An instance consists of an undirected graph G, list constraints L, weights imposed on the vertices of G, and a map \({f:V(G) \to V(H)}\) given as an oracle access. The objective is to determine whether f is a list H-homomorphism or far from any list H-homomorphism. The farness is measured by the total weight of vertices \({v \in V(G)}\) for which f(v) must be changed so as to make f a list H-homomorphism. In this paper, we classify graphs H with respect to the number of queries to f required to test the list H-homomorphisms. Specifically, we show that (i) list H-homomorphisms are testable with a constant number of queries if and only if H is a reflexive complete graph or an irreflexive complete bipartite graph and (ii) list H-homomorphisms are testable with a sublinear number of queries if and only if H is a bi-arc graph.     

Least common container of tree pattern queries and its applications

Tree patterns represent important fragments of XPath. In this paper, we show that some classes \({\mathcal{C}}\) of tree patterns exhibit such a property that, given a finite number of compatible tree patterns \({P_1, \ldots, P_n\in \mathcal{C}}\), there exists another pattern P such that P ₁, . . . , P _n are all contained in P, and for any tree pattern \({Q\in \mathcal{C}}\), P ₁, . . . , P _n are all contained in Q if and only if P is contained in Q. We experimentally demonstrate that the pattern P is usually much smaller than P ₁, . . . , P _n combined together. Using the existence of P above, we show that testing whether a tree pattern, P, is contained in another, \({Q\in \mathcal{C}}\), under an acyclic schema graph G, can be reduced to testing whether P _G , a transformed version of P, is contained in Q without any schema graph, provided that the distinguished node of P is not labeled *. We then show that, under G, the maximal contained rewriting (MCR) of a tree pattern Q using a view V can be found by finding the MCR of Q using V _G without G, when there are no *-nodes on the distinguished path of V and no *-nodes in Q.     

Quantum correlations for bipartite continuous-variable systems

Two quantum correlations Q and \(Q_\mathcal P\) for \((m+n)\)-mode continuous-variable systems are introduced in terms of average distance between the reduced states under the local Gaussian positive operator-valued measurements, and analytical formulas of these quantum correlations for bipartite Gaussian states are provided. It is shown that the product states do not contain these quantum correlations, and conversely, all \((m+n)\)-mode Gaussian states with zero quantum correlations are product states. Generally, \(Q\ge Q_{\mathcal P}\), but for the symmetric two-mode squeezed thermal states, these quantum correlations are the same and a computable formula is given. In addition, Q is compared with Gaussian geometric discord for symmetric squeezed thermal states.     

Construction of quantum caps in projective space <Emphasis Type="Italic">PG</Emphasis>(<Emphasis Type="Italic">r</Emphasis>, 4) and quantum codes of distance 4

Constructions of quantum caps in projective space PG(r, 4) by recursive methods and computer search are discussed. For each even n satisfying \(n\ge 282\) and each odd z satisfying \(z\ge 275\), a quantum n-cap and a quantum z-cap in \(PG(k-1, 4)\) with suitable k are constructed, and \([[n,n-2k,4]]\) and \([[z,z-2k,4]]\) quantum codes are derived from the constructed quantum n-cap and z-cap, respectively. For \(n\ge 282\) and \(n\ne 286\), 756 and 5040, or \(z\ge 275\), the results on the sizes of quantum caps and quantum codes are new, and all the obtained quantum codes are optimal codes according to the quantum Hamming bound. While constructing quantum caps, we also obtain many large caps in PG(r, 4) for \(r\ge 11\). These results concerning large caps provide improved lower bounds on the maximal sizes of caps in PG(r, 4) for \(r\ge 11\).     

Quantum algorithm to solve function inversion with time–space trade-off

In general, it is a difficult problem to solve the inverse of any function. With the inverse implication operation, we present a quantum algorithm for solving the inversion of function via using time–space trade-off in this paper. The details are as follows. Let function \(f(x)=y\) have k solutions, where \(x\in \{0, 1\}^{n}, y\in \{0, 1\}^{m}\) for any integers n, m. We show that an iterative algorithm can be used to solve the inverse of function f(x) with successful probability \(1-\left( 1-\frac{k}{2^{n}}\right) ^{L}\) for \(L\in Z^{+}\). The space complexity of proposed quantum iterative algorithm is O(Ln), where L is the number of iterations. The paper concludes that, via using time–space trade-off strategy, we improve the successful probability of algorithm.     

A general framework for architecture composability

Architectures depict design principles: paradigms that can be understood by all, allow thinking on a higher plane and avoiding low-level mistakes. They provide means for ensuring correctness by construction by enforcing global properties characterizing the coordination between components. An architecture can be considered as an operator A that, applied to a set of components \({\mathcal{B}}\), builds a composite component \({A(\mathcal{B})}\) meeting a characteristic property \({\Phi}\). Architecture composability is a basic and common problem faced by system designers. In this paper, we propose a formal and general framework for architecture composability based on an associative, commutative and idempotent architecture composition operator \({\oplus}\). The main result is that if two architectures A ₁ and A ₂ enforce respectively safety properties \({\Phi_{1}}\) and \({\Phi_{2}}\), the architecture \({A_{1} \oplus A_{2}}\) enforces the property \({\Phi_{1} \land \Phi_{2}}\), that is both properties are preserved by architecture composition. We also establish preservation of liveness properties by architecture composition. The presented results are illustrated by a running example and a case study.     

Quartic B-spline collocation method for fifth order boundary value problems

Given two sorted arrays \({A=(a_1,a_2,\ldots ,a_{n_1})}\) and \({B=(b_1,b_2,\ldots ,b_{n_2})}\), where their elements are drawn from a linear range in n and n = Max(n ₁, n ₂). The merging of two sorted arrays is one of the fundamental problems in computer science. The main contribution of this work is to give a new merging algorithm on a EREW PRAM. The algorithm is cost optimal, deterministic and simple. The algorithm uses \({\frac{n}{\log{n}}}\) processors and O(n) storage. We also give the conditions that make the algorithm run in a constant time on a EREW PRAM.     

The panpositionable panconnectedness of crossed cubes

In many parallel and distributed multiprocessor systems, the processors are connected based on different types of interconnection networks. The topological structure of an interconnection network is typically modeled as a graph. Among the many kinds of network topologies, the crossed cube is one of the most popular. In this paper, we investigate the panpositionable panconnectedness problem with respect to the crossed cube. A graph G is r-panpositionably panconnected if for any three distinct vertices x, y, z of G and for any integer \(l_1\) satisfying \(r \le l_1 \le |V(G)| - r - 1\), there exists a path \(P = [x, P_1, y, P_2, z]\) in G such that (i) \(P_1\) joins x and y with \(l(P_1) = l_1\) and (ii) \(P_2\) joins y and z with \(l(P_2) = l_2\) for any integer \(l_2\) satisfying \(r \le l_2 \le |V(G)| - l_1 - 1\), where |V(G)| is the total number of vertices in G and \(l(P_1)\) (respectively, \(l(P_2)\)) is the length of path \(P_1\) (respectively, \(P_2\)). By mathematical induction, we demonstrate that the n-dimensional crossed cube \(CQ_n\) is n-panpositionably panconnected. This result indicates that the path embedding of joining x and z with a mediate vertex y in \(CQ_n\) is extremely flexible. Moreover, applying our result, crossed cube problems such as panpositionable pancyclicity, panpositionably Hamiltonian connectedness, and panpositionable Hamiltonicity can be solved.     

Counter machines and crystallographic structures

One way to depict a crystallographic structure is by a periodic (di)graph, i.e., a graph whose group of automorphisms has a translational subgroup of finite index acting freely on the structure. We establish a relationship between periodic graphs representing crystallographic structures and an infinite hierarchy of intersection languages \(\mathcal {DCL}_d,\,d=0,1,2,\ldots \), within the intersection classes of deterministic context-free languages. We introduce a class of counter machines that accept these languages, where the machines with d counters recognize the class \(\mathcal {DCL}_d\). An intersection of d languages in \(\mathcal {DCL}_1\) defines \(\mathcal {DCL}_d\). We prove that there is a one-to-one correspondence between sets of walks starting and ending in the same unit of a d-dimensional periodic (di)graph and the class of languages in \(\mathcal {DCL}_d\). The proof uses the following result: given a digraph \(\Delta \) and a group G, there is a unique digraph \(\Gamma \) such that \(G\le \mathrm{Aut}\,\Gamma ,\,G\) acts freely on the structure, and \(\Gamma /G \cong \Delta \).     

Entanglement witness criteria of strong-<Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis>-separability for multipartite quantum states

Let \(H_{1}, H_{2},\ldots ,H_{n}\) be separable complex Hilbert spaces with \(\dim H_{i}\ge 2\) and \(n\ge 2\). Assume that \(\rho \) is a state in \(H=H_1\otimes H_2\otimes \cdots \otimes H_n\). \(\rho \) is called strong-k-separable \((2\le k\le n)\) if \(\rho \) is separable for any k-partite division of H. In this paper, an entanglement witnesses criterion of strong-k-separability is obtained, which says that \(\rho \) is not strong-k-separable if and only if there exist a k-division space \(H_{m_{1}}\otimes \cdots \otimes H_{m_{k}}\) of H, a finite-rank linear elementary operator positive on product states \(\Lambda :\mathcal {B}(H_{m_{2}}\otimes \cdots \otimes H_{m_{k}})\rightarrow \mathcal {B}(H_{m_{1}})\) and a state \(\rho _{0}\in \mathcal {S}(H_{m_{1}}\otimes H_{m_{1}})\), such that \(\mathrm {Tr}(W\rho )<0\), where \(W=(\mathrm{Id}\otimes \Lambda ^{\dagger })\rho _{0}\) is an entanglement witness. In addition, several different methods of constructing entanglement witnesses for multipartite states are also given.     

An optimal adaptive stabilizing algorithm for two edge-disjoint paths problem

The problem of two edge-disjoint paths is to identify two paths \(Q_1\) and \(Q_2\) from source \(s \in V\) to target \(t \in V\) without any common arc in a directed connected graph \(G=(V, E)\). In this paper, we present an adaptive stabilizing algorithm for finding a pair of edge-disjoint paths from s to t in G in O(D) rounds with state-space complexity of \(O(log\; n)\) bits per process, where n is the number of nodes and D is the diameter of the graph. The proposed algorithm is optimal with respect to its time complexity, and the total length of the shortest paths. In addition, it can also be used to solve the problem for undirected graphs. Since the proposed algorithm is stabilizing, it does not require initialization and is capable of withstanding transient faults. We view a fault that perturbs the state of the system but not its program as a transient fault. In addition, the proposed algorithm is adaptive since it is capable of dealing with topology changes in the form of addition/removal of arcs and/or nodes as well as changes in the directions of arcs provided that two edge-disjoint paths between s and t exist after the topology change.     

Polylogarithms and the Asymptotic Formula for the Moments of Lebesgue’s Singular Function

Recall that Lebesgue’s singular function L(t) is defined as the unique solution to the equation L(t) = qL(2t) + pL(2t ? 1), where p, q > 0, q = 1 ? p, p ≠ q. The variables M _n = ∫₀¹t ⁿ dL(t), n = 0,1,… are called the moments of the function The principal result of this work is \({M_n} = {n^{{{\log }_2}p}}{e^{ - \tau (n)}}(1 + O({n^{ - 0.99}}))\), where the function τ(x) is periodic in log₂x with the period 1 and is given as \(\tau (x) = \frac{1}{2}1np + \Gamma '(1)lo{g_2}p + \frac{1}{{1n2}}\frac{\partial }{{\partial z}}L{i_z}( - \frac{q}{p}){|_{z = 1}} + \frac{1}{{1n2}}\sum\nolimits_{k \ne 0} {\Gamma ({z_k})L{i_{{z_k} + 1}}( - \frac{q}{p})} {x^{ - {z_k}}}\), \({z_k} = \frac{{2\pi ik}}{{1n2}}\), k ≠ 0. The proof is based on poissonization and the Mellin transform.     

A counterexample to the chain rule for conditional HILL entropy

Most entropy notions \({H(.)}\) like Shannon or min-entropy satisfy a chain rule stating that for random variables \({X,Z,}\) and \({A}\) we have \({H(X|Z,A)\ge H(X|Z)-|A|}\). That is, by conditioning on \({A}\) the entropy of \({X}\) can decrease by at most the bitlength \({|A|}\) of \({A}\). Such chain rules are known to hold for some computational entropy notions like Yao’s and unpredictability-entropy. For HILL entropy, the computational analogue of min-entropy, the chain rule is of special interest and has found many applications, including leakage-resilient cryptography, deterministic encryption, and memory delegation. These applications rely on restricted special cases of the chain rule. Whether the chain rule for conditional HILL entropy holds in general was an open problem for which we give a strong negative answer: we construct joint distributions \({(X,Z,A)}\), where \({A}\) is a distribution over a single bit, such that the HILL entropy H ^HILL \({(X|Z)}\) is large but H ^HILL \({(X|Z,A)}\) is basically zero.Our counterexample just makes the minimal assumption that \({{\mathbf{NP}} \nsubseteq{\mathbf{P/poly}}}\). Under the stronger assumption that injective one-way function exist, we can make all the distributions efficiently samplable.Finally, we show that some more sophisticated cryptographic objects like lossy functions can be used to sample a distribution constituting a counterexample to the chain rule making only a single invocation to the underlying object.     

Exact and approximate flexible aggregate similarity search

Aggregate similarity search, also known as aggregate nearest-neighbor (Ann) query, finds many useful applications in spatial and multimedia databases. Given a group Q of M query objects, it retrieves from a database the objects most similar to Q, where the similarity is an aggregation (e.g., \({{\mathrm{sum}}}\), \(\max \)) of the distances between each retrieved object p and all the objects in Q. In this paper, we propose an added flexibility to the query definition, where the similarity is an aggregation over the distances between p and any subset of \(\phi M\) objects in Q for some support \(0< \phi \le 1\). We call this new definition flexible aggregate similarity search and accordingly refer to a query as a flexible aggregate nearest-neighbor ( Fann ) query. We present algorithms for answering Fann queries exactly and approximately. Our approximation algorithms are especially appealing, which are simple, highly efficient, and work well in both low and high dimensions. They also return near-optimal answers with guaranteed constant-factor approximations in any dimensions. Extensive experiments on large real and synthetic datasets from 2 to 74 dimensions have demonstrated their superior efficiency and high quality.     

Factors of low individual degree polynomials

Kaltofen (Randomness in computation, vol 5, pp 375–412, 1989) proved the remarkable fact that multivariate polynomial factorization can be done efficiently, in randomized polynomial time. Still, more than twenty years after Kaltofen’s work, many questions remain unanswered regarding the complexity aspects of polynomial factorization, such as the question of whether factors of polynomials efficiently computed by arithmetic formulas also have small arithmetic formulas, asked in Kopparty et al. (2014), and the question of bounding the depth of the circuits computing the factors of a polynomial. We are able to answer these questions in the affirmative for the interesting class of polynomials of bounded individual degrees, which contains polynomials such as the determinant and the permanent. We show that if \({P(x_{1},\ldots,x_{n})}\) is a polynomial with individual degrees bounded by r that can be computed by a formula of size s and depth d, then any factor \({f(x_{1},\ldots, x_{n})}\) of \({P(x_{1},\ldots,x_{n})}\) can be computed by a formula of size \({\textsf{poly}((rn)^{r},s)}\) and depth d + 5. This partially answers the question above posed in Kopparty et al. (2014), who asked if this result holds without the dependence on r. Our work generalizes the main factorization theorem from Dvir et al. (SIAM J Comput 39(4):1279–1293, 2009), who proved it for the special case when the factors are of the form \({f(x_{1}, \ldots, x_{n}) \equiv x_{n} - g(x_{1}, \ldots, x_{n-1})}\). Along the way, we introduce several new technical ideas that could be of independent interest when studying arithmetic circuits (or formulas).     

Ambiguity and Communication

The ambiguity of a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) N for input size n is the maximal number of accepting computations of N for inputs of size n. For every natural number k we construct a family \((L_{r}^{k}\;|\;r\in \mathbb{N})\) of languages which can be recognized by NFA’s with size k?poly(r) and ambiguity O(n ^k ), but \(L_{r}^{k}\) has only NFA’s with size exponential in r, if ambiguity o(n ^k ) is required. In particular, a hierarchy for polynomial ambiguity is obtained, solving a long standing open problem (Ravikumar and Ibarra, SIAM J. Comput. 19:1263–1282, 1989, Leung, SIAM J. Comput. 27:1073–1082, 1998).     

A Framework for Certified Boolean Branch-and-Bound Optimization

We consider optimization problems of the form (S, cost), where S is a clause set over Boolean variables x ₁?...?x _n , with an arbitrary cost function \(\mathit{cost}\colon \mathbb{B}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\), and the aim is to find a model A of S such that cost(A) is minimized. Here we study the generation of proofs of optimality in the context of branch-and-bound procedures for such problems. For this purpose we introduce \(\mathtt{DPLL_{BB}}\), an abstract DPLL-based branch-and-bound algorithm that can model optimization concepts such as cost-based propagation and cost-based backjumping. Most, if not all, SAT-related optimization problems are in the scope of \(\mathtt{DPLL_{BB}}\). Since many of the existing approaches for solving these problems can be seen as instances, \(\mathtt{DPLL_{BB}}\) allows one to formally reason about them in a simple way and exploit the enhancements of \(\mathtt{DPLL_{BB}}\) given here, in particular its uniform method for generating independently verifiable optimality proofs.     

The hierarchical Petersen network: a new interconnection network with fixed degree

Network cost and fixed-degree characteristic for the graph are important factors to evaluate interconnection networks. In this paper, we propose hierarchical Petersen network (HPN) that is constructed in recursive and hierarchical structure based on a Petersen graph as a basic module. The degree of HPN(n) is 5, and HPN(n) has \(10^n\) nodes and \(2.5 \times 10^n\) edges. And we analyze its basic topological properties, routing algorithm, diameter, spanning tree, broadcasting algorithm and embedding. From the analysis, we prove that the diameter and network cost of HPN(n) are \(3\log _{10}N-1\) and \(15 \log _{10}N-1\), respectively, and it contains a spanning tree with the degree of 4. In addition, we propose link-disjoint one-to-all broadcasting algorithm and show that HPN(n) can be embedded into FP\(_k\) with expansion 1, dilation 2k and congestion 4. For most of the fixed-degree networks proposed, network cost and diameter require \(O(\sqrt{N})\) and the degree of the graph requires O(N). However, HPN(n) requires O(1) for the degree and \(O(\log _{10}N)\) for both diameter and network cost. As a result, the suggested interconnection network in this paper is superior to current fixed-degree and hierarchical networks in terms of network cost, diameter and the degree of the graph.