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1. The Power of Shared Randomness in Uncertain Communication

   Ghazi, B. ; Sudan, M. ( July 2017 , 44th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2017))

   In a recent work (Ghazi et al., SODA 2016), the authors with Komargodski and Kothari initiated the study of communication with contextual uncertainty, a setup aiming to understand how efficient communication is possible when the communicating parties imperfectly share a huge context. In this setting, Alice is given a function f and an input string x, and Bob is given a function g and an input string y. The pair (x,y) comes from a known distribution mu and f and g are guaranteed to be close under this distribution. Alice and Bob wish to compute g(x,y) with high probability. The lack of agreement between Alice and Bob on the function that is being computed captures the uncertainty in the context. The previous work showed that any problem with one-way communication complexity k in the standard model (i.e., without uncertainty, in other words, under the promise that f=g) has public-coin communication at most O(k(1+I)) bits in the uncertain case, where I is the mutual information between x and y. Moreover, a lower bound of Omega(sqrt{I}) bits on the public-coin uncertain communication was also shown. However, an important question that was left open is related to the power that public randomness bringsmore »to uncertain communication. Can Alice and Bob achieve efficient communication amid uncertainty without using public randomness? And how powerful are public-coin protocols in overcoming uncertainty? Motivated by these two questions: - We prove the first separation between private-coin uncertain communication and public-coin uncertain communication. Namely, we exhibit a function class for which the communication in the standard model and the public-coin uncertain communication are O(1) while the private-coin uncertain communication is a growing function of n (the length of the inputs). This lower bound (proved with respect to the uniform distribution) is in sharp contrast with the case of public-coin uncertain communication which was shown by the previous work to be within a constant factor from the certain communication. This lower bound also implies the first separation between public-coin uncertain communication and deterministic uncertain communication. Interestingly, we also show that if Alice and Bob imperfectly share a sequence of random bits (a setup weaker than public randomness), then achieving a constant blow-up in communication is still possible. - We improve the lower-bound of the previous work on public-coin uncertain communication. Namely, we exhibit a function class and a distribution (with mutual information I approx n) for which the one-way certain communication is k bits but the one-way public-coin uncertain communication is at least Omega(sqrt{k}*sqrt{I}) bits. Our proofs introduce new problems in the standard communication complexity model and prove lower bounds for these problems. Both the problems and the lower bound techniques may be of general interest.« less
2. Source Coding for Synthesizing Correlated Randomness

   Atif, Touheed ( June 2020 , Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory)

   We consider a scenario wherein two parties Alice and Bob are provided X1 and X2 – samples that are IID from a PMF P_X1X2. Alice and Bob can communicate to Charles over (noiseless) communication links of rate R1 and R2 respectively. Their goal is to enable Charles generate samples Y such that the triple (X1,X2,Y) has a PMF that is close, in total variation, to P_X1X2Y. In addition, the three parties may posses shared common randomness at rate C. We address the problem of characterizing the set of rate triples (R1, R2, C) for which the above goal can be accomplished. We provide a set of sufficient conditions, i.e., an achievable rate region for this three party setup. Our work also provides a complete characterization of a point-to-point setup wherein Bob is absent and Charles is provided with side-information.
3. Communication Complexity of Inner Product in Symmetric Normed Spaces

   Andoni, Alexandr ; Blasiok, Jaroslaw ; Filtser, Arnold ( January 2023 , Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   Tauman Kalai, Yael (Ed.)

   We introduce and study the communication complexity of computing the inner product of two vectors, where the input is restricted w.r.t. a norm N on the space ℝⁿ. Here, Alice and Bob hold two vectors v,u such that ‖v‖_N ≤ 1 and ‖u‖_{N^*} ≤ 1, where N^* is the dual norm. The goal is to compute their inner product ⟨v,u⟩ up to an ε additive term. The problem is denoted by IP_N, and generalizes important previously studied problems, such as: (1) Computing the expectation 𝔼_{x∼𝒟}[f(x)] when Alice holds 𝒟 and Bob holds f is equivalent to IP_{𝓁₁}. (2) Computing v^TAv where Alice has a symmetric matrix with bounded operator norm (denoted S_∞) and Bob has a vector v where ‖v‖₂ = 1. This problem is complete for quantum communication complexity and is equivalent to IP_{S_∞}. We systematically study IP_N, showing the following results, near tight in most cases: 1) For any symmetric norm N, given ‖v‖_N ≤ 1 and ‖u‖_{N^*} ≤ 1 there is a randomized protocol using 𝒪̃(ε^{-6} log n) bits of communication that returns a value in ⟨u,v⟩±ε with probability 2/3 - we will denote this by ℛ_{ε,1/3}(IP_N) ≤ 𝒪̃(ε^{-6} log n). In a special case where Nmore »= 𝓁_p and N^* = 𝓁_q for p^{-1} + q^{-1} = 1, we obtain an improved bound ℛ_{ε,1/3}(IP_{𝓁_p}) ≤ 𝒪(ε^{-2} log n), nearly matching the lower bound ℛ_{ε, 1/3}(IP_{𝓁_p}) ≥ Ω(min(n, ε^{-2})). 2) One way communication complexity ℛ^{→}_{ε,δ}(IP_{𝓁_p}) ≤ 𝒪(ε^{-max(2,p)}⋅ log n/ε), and a nearly matching lower bound ℛ^{→}_{ε, 1/3}(IP_{𝓁_p}) ≥ Ω(ε^{-max(2,p)}) for ε^{-max(2,p)} ≪ n. 3) One way communication complexity ℛ^{→}_{ε,δ}(N) for a symmetric norm N is governed by the distortion of the embedding 𝓁_∞^k into N. Specifically, while a small distortion embedding easily implies a lower bound Ω(k), we show that, conversely, non-existence of such an embedding implies protocol with communication k^𝒪(log log k) log² n. 4) For arbitrary origin symmetric convex polytope P, we show ℛ_{ε,1/3}(IP_{N}) ≤ 𝒪(ε^{-2} log xc(P)), where N is the unique norm for which P is a unit ball, and xc(P) is the extension complexity of P (i.e. the smallest number of inequalities describing some polytope P' s.t. P is projection of P').« less
4. The Communication Complexity of Optimization

   https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611975994.106  

   Vempala, Santosh S. ; Wang, Ruosong ; Woodruff, David P. ( January 2020 , ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms)

   We consider the communication complexity of a number of distributed optimization problems. We start with the problem of solving a linear system. Suppose there is a coordinator together with s servers P1, …, Ps, the i-th of which holds a subset A(i) x = b(i) of ni constraints of a linear system in d variables, and the coordinator would like to output an x ϵ ℝd for which A(i) x = b(i) for i = 1, …, s. We assume each coefficient of each constraint is specified using L bits. We first resolve the randomized and deterministic communication complexity in the point-to-point model of communication, showing it is (d2 L + sd) and (sd2L), respectively. We obtain similar results for the blackboard communication model. As a result of independent interest, we show the probability a random matrix with integer entries in {–2L, …, 2L} is invertible is 1–2−Θ(dL), whereas previously only 1 – 2−Θ(d) was known. When there is no solution to the linear system, a natural alternative is to find the solution minimizing the ℓp loss, which is the ℓp regression problem. While this problem has been studied, we give improved upper or lower bounds for every value ofmore »p ≥ 1. One takeaway message is that sampling and sketching techniques, which are commonly used in earlier work on distributed optimization, are neither optimal in the dependence on d nor on the dependence on the approximation ε, thus motivating new techniques from optimization to solve these problems. Towards this end, we consider the communication complexity of optimization tasks which generalize linear systems, such as linear, semi-definite, and convex programming. For linear programming, we first resolve the communication complexity when d is constant, showing it is (sL) in the point-to-point model. For general d and in the point-to-point model, we show an Õ(sd3L) upper bound and an (d2 L + sd) lower bound. In fact, we show if one perturbs the coefficients randomly by numbers as small as 2−Θ(L), then the upper bound is Õ(sd2L) + poly(dL), and so this bound holds for almost all linear programs. Our study motivates understanding the bit complexity of linear programming, which is related to the running time in the unit cost RAM model with words of O(log(nd)) bits, and we give the fastest known algorithms for linear programming in this model. Read More: https://epubs.siam.org/doi/10.1137/1.9781611975994.106« less
5. gOTzilla: Efficient Disjunctive Zero-Knowledge Proofs from MPC in the Head, with Application to Proofs of Assets in Cryptocurrencies

   https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2022-0107  

   Baldimtsi, Foteini ; Chatzigiannis, Panagiotis ; Gordon, S. Dov ; Le, Phi Hung ; McVicker, Daniel ( October 2022 , Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies)

   We present gOTzilla, a protocol for interactive zero-knowledge proofs for very large disjunctive statements of the following format: given publicly known circuit C, and set of values Y = {y1 , . . . , yn }, prove knowledge of a witness x such that C(x) = y1 ∨ C(x) = y2 ∨ · · · ∨ C(x) = yn . These type of statements are extremely important for the proof of assets (PoA) problem in cryptocurrencies where a prover wants to prove the knowledge of a secret key sk that associates with the hash of a public key H(pk) posted on the ledger. We note that the size of n in popular cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, is estimated to 80 million. For the construction of gOTzilla, we start by observing that if we restructure the proof statement to an equivalent of proving knowledge of (x, y) such that (C(x) = y) ∧ (y = y1 ∨ · · · ∨ y = yn )), then we can reduce the disjunction of equalities to 1-out-of-N oblivious transfer (OT). Our overall protocol is based on the MPC in the head (MPCitH) paradigm. We additionally provide a concrete, efficient extension of ourmore »protocol for the case where C combines algebraic and non-algebraic statements (which is the case in the PoA application). We achieve an asymptotic communication cost of O(log n) plus the proof size of the underlying MPCitH protocol. While related work has similar asymptotic complexity, our approach results in concrete performance improvements. We implement our protocol and provide benchmarks. Concretely, for a set of size 1 million entries, the total run-time of our protocol is 14.89 seconds using 48 threads, with 6.18 MB total communication, which is about 4x faster compared to the state of the art when considering a disjunctive statement with algebraic and non-algebraic elements.« less