"Mining Circuit Lower Bound Proofs for Meta-Algorithms"
Valentine Kabanets
Simon Fraser University
Monday, August 12st, 2013, 2:00 pm
EBU3B, Room 4217
Abstract:
We show that circuit lower bound proofs based on the method of random restrictions yield non-trivial \emph{compression algorithms} for ``easy'' Boolean functions from the corresponding circuit classes. The compression problem is defined as follows: given the truth table of an $n$-variate Boolean function $f$ computable by some \emph{unknown small circuit} from a \emph{known class} of circuits, find in deterministic time $\poly(2^n)$ a circuit $C$ (no restriction on the type of $C$) computing $f$ so that the size of $C$ is less than the trivial circuit size $2^n/n$. We get non-trivial compression for functions computable by $\AC^0$ circuits, (de Morgan) formulas, and (read-once) branching programs of the size for which the lower bounds for the corresponding circuit class are known.
These compression algorithms rely on the structural characterizations of ``easy'' functions, which are useful both for proving circuit lower bounds and for designing ``meta-algorithms'' (such as Circuit-SAT). For (de Morgan) formulas, such structural characterization is provided by the ``shrinkage under random restrictions'' results~\cite{Sub61,Has98-shrinkage}, strengthened to the ``high-probability'' version by~\cite{San10,IMZ12,KR12}. We give a new, simple proof of the ``high-probability'' version of the shrinkage result for (de Morgan) formulas, with improved parameters. We use this shrinkage result to get both compression and \#SAT algorithms for (de Morgan) formulas of size about $n^2$. We also use this shrinkage result to get an alternative proof of the recent result by Komargodski and Raz~\cite{KR12} of the average-case lower bound against small (de Morgan) formulas.
Finally, we show that the existence of any non-trivial compression algorithm for a circuit class $\mathcal{C}\subseteq\P/\poly$ would imply the circuit lower bound $\NEXP\not\subseteq \mathcal{C}$. This complements Williams's result~\cite{Wil10} that any non-trivial Circuit-SAT algorithm for a circuit class $\mathcal{C}$ would imply a superpolynomial lower bound against $\mathcal{C}$ for a language in $\NEXP$.
(based on joint work with Ruiwen Chen, Antonina Kolokolova, Ronen Shaltiel, and David Zuckerman)