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1. The Non-Hardness of Approximating Circuit Size

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19955-5_2  

   Allender, Eric ; Ilango, Rahul ; Vafa, Neekon ( January 2021 , Theory of computing systems)

   The Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) has been the focus of intense study recently; MCSP is hard for SZK under rather powerful reductions, and is provably not hard under "local" reductions computable in TIME(n^0.49) . The question of whether MCSP is NP-hard (or indeed, hard even for small subclasses of P) under some of the more familiar notions of reducibility (such as many-one or Turing reductions computable in polynomial time or in AC^0) is closely related to many of the longstanding open questions in complexity theory. All prior hardness results for MCSP hold also for computing somewhat weak approximations to the circuit complexity of a function. Some of these results were proved by exploiting a connection to a notion of time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity (KT) and the corresponding decision problem (MKTP). More recently, a new approach for proving improved hardness results for MKTP was developed, but this approach establishes only hardness of extremely good approximations of the form 1+o(1), and these improved hardness results are not yet known to hold for MCSP. In particular, it is known that MKTP is hard for the complexity class DET under nonuniform AC^0 m-reductions, implying MKTP is not in AC^0[p] for any prime p. It was still open if similar circuit lower bounds hold for MCSP. One possible avenue for proving a similar hardness result for MCSP would be to improve the hardness of approximation for MKTP beyond 1 + o(1) to omega(1), as KT-complexity and circuit size are polynomially-related. In this paper, we show that this approach cannot succeed. More specically, we prove that PARITY does not reduce to the problem of computing superlinear approximations to KT-complexity or circuit size via AC^0-Turing reductions that make O(1) queries. This is signicant, since approximating any set in P/poly AC^0-reduces to just one query of a much worse approximation of circuit size or KT-complexity. For weaker approximations, we also prove non-hardness under more powerful reductions. Our non-hardness results are unconditional, in contrast to conditional results presented in earlier work (for more powerful reductions, but for much worse approximations). This highlights obstacles that would have to be overcome by any proof that MKTP or MCSP is hard for NP under AC^0 reductions. It may also be a step toward conrming a conjecture of Murray and Williams, that MCSP is not NP-complete under logtime-uniform AC0 m-reductions. 

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2. The Minimum Oracle Circuit Size Problem

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00037-016-0124-0  

   Allender, Eric ; Holden, Dhiraj ; Kabanets, Valentine ( January 2016 , computational complexity)

   We consider variants of the Minimum Circuit Size Problem MCSP, where the goal is to minimize the size of oracle circuits computing a given function. When the oracle is QBF, the resulting problem MCSP[superscript]QBF is known to be complete for PSPACE under ZPP reductions. We show that it is not complete under logspace reductions, and indeed it is not even hard for TC[superscript]0 under uniform AC[superscript]0 reductions. We obtain a variety of consequences that follow if oracle versions of MCSP are hard for various complexity classes under different types of reductions. We also prove analogous results for the problem of determining the resource-bounded Kolmogorov complexity of strings, for certain types of Kolmogorov complexity measures. 

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3. Regularization of Low Error PCPs and an Application to MCSP

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2023.39  

   Hirahara, Shuichi ; Moshkovitz, Dana ( November 2023 , 34th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2023))

   Iwata, Satoru ; Kakimura, Naonori (Ed.)

   In a regular PCP the verifier queries each proof symbol in the same number of tests. This number is called the degree of the proof, and it is at least 1/(sq) where s is the soundness error and q is the number of queries. It is incredibly useful to have regularity and reduced degree in PCP. There is an expander-based transformation by Papadimitriou and Yannakakis that transforms any PCP with a constant number of queries and constant soundness error to a regular PCP with constant degree. There are also transformations for low error projection and unique PCPs. Other PCPs are constructed especially to be regular. In this work we show how to regularize and reduce degree of PCPs with a possibly large number of queries and low soundness error. As an application, we prove NP-hardness of an unweighted variant of the collective minimum monotone satisfying assignment problem, which was introduced by Hirahara (FOCS'22) to prove NP-hardness of MCSP^* (the partial function variant of the Minimum Circuit Size Problem) under randomized reductions. We present a simplified proof and sufficient conditions under which MCSP^* is NP-hard under the standard notion of reduction: MCSP^* is NP-hard under deterministic polynomial-time many-one reductions if there exists a function in E that satisfies certain direct sum properties. 

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4. Public-Key Cryptography in the Fine-Grained Setting

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26954-8_20  

   LaVigne, R. ; Lincoln, A. ; Vassilevska Williams, V. ( January 2019 , Advances in Cryptology {\textendash} {CRYPTO} 2019)

   Cryptography is largely based on unproven assumptions, which, while believable, might fail. Notably if P=NP, or if we live in Pessiland, then all current cryptographic assumptions will be broken. A compelling question is if any interesting cryptography might exist in Pessiland. A natural approach to tackle this question is to base cryptography on an assumption from fine-grained complexity. Ball, Rosen, Sabin, and Vasudevan [BRSV’17] attempted this, starting from popular hardness assumptions, such as the Orthogonal Vectors (OV) Conjecture. They obtained problems that are hard on average, assuming that OV and other problems are hard in the worst case. They obtained proofs of work, and hoped to use their average-case hard problems to build a fine-grained one-way function. Unfortunately, they proved that constructing one using their approach would violate a popular hardness hypothesis. This motivates the search for other fine-grained average-case hard problems. The main goal of this paper is to identify sufficient properties for a fine-grained average-case assumption that imply cryptographic primitives such as fine-grained public key cryptography (PKC). Our main contribution is a novel construction of a cryptographic key exchange, together with the definition of a small number of relatively weak structural properties, such that if a computational problem satisfies them, our key exchange has provable fine-grained security guarantees, based on the hardness of this problem. We then show that a natural and plausible average-case assumption for the key problem Zero-k-Clique from fine-grained complexity satisfies our properties. We also develop fine-grained one-way functions and hardcore bits even under these weaker assumptions. Where previous works had to assume random oracles or the existence of strong one-way functions to get a key-exchange computable in O(n) time secure against O(n^2) time adversaries (see [Merkle’78] and [BGI’08]), our assumptions seem much weaker. Our key exchange has a similar gap between the computation of the honest party and the adversary as prior work, while being non-interactive, implying fine-grained PKC. 

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5. Can We Break Symmetry with o(m) Communication?

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3465084  

   Pai, Shreyas ; Pandurangan, Gopal ; Pemmaraju, Sriram ; Robinson, Peter ( July 2021 , PODC'21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing)

   null (Ed.)

   We study the communication cost (or message complexity) of fundamental distributed symmetry breaking problems, namely, coloring and MIS. While significant progress has been made in understanding and improving the running time of such problems, much less is known about the message complexity of these problems. In fact, all known algorithms need at least Ω(m) communication for these problems, where m is the number of edges in the graph. We addressthe following question in this paper: can we solve problems such as coloring and MIS using sublinear, i.e., o(m) communication, and if sounder what conditions? In a classical result, Awerbuch, Goldreich, Peleg, and Vainish [JACM 1990] showed that fundamental global problems such asbroadcast and spanning tree construction require at least o(m) messages in the KT-1 Congest model (i.e., Congest model in which nodes have initial knowledge of the neighbors' ID's) when algorithms are restricted to be comparison-based (i.e., algorithms inwhich node ID's can only be compared). Thirty five years after this result, King, Kutten, and Thorup [PODC 2015] showed that onecan solve the above problems using Õ(n) messages (n is the number of nodes in the graph) in Õ(n) rounds in the KT-1 Congest model if non-comparison-based algorithms are permitted. An important implication of this result is that one can use the synchronous nature of the KT-1 Congest model, using silence to convey information,and solve any graph problem using non-comparison-based algorithms with Õ(n) messages, but this takes an exponential number of rounds. In the asynchronous model, even this is not possible. In contrast, much less is known about the message complexity of local symmetry breaking problems such as coloring and MIS. Our paper fills this gap by presenting the following results. Lower bounds: In the KT-1 CONGEST model, we show that any comparison-based algorithm, even a randomized Monte Carlo algorithm with constant success probability, requires Ω(n 2) messages in the worst case to solve either (△ + 1)-coloring or MIS, regardless of the number of rounds. We also show that Ω(n) is a lower bound on the number ofmessages for any (△ + 1)-coloring or MIS algorithm, even non-comparison-based, and even with nodes having initial knowledge of up to a constant radius. Upper bounds: In the KT-1 CONGEST model, we present the following randomized non-comparison-based algorithms for coloring that, with high probability, use o(m) messages and run in polynomially many rounds.(a) A (△ + 1)-coloring algorithm that uses Õ(n1.5) messages, while running in Õ(D + √ n) rounds, where D is the graph diameter. Our result also implies an asynchronous algorithm for (△ + 1)-coloring with the same message bound but running in Õ(n) rounds. (b) For any constantε > 0, a (1+ε)△-coloring algorithm that uses Õ(n/ε 2 ) messages, while running in Õ(n) rounds. If we increase our input knowledge slightly to radius 2, i.e.,in the KT-2 CONGEST model, we obtain:(c) A randomized comparison-based MIS algorithm that uses Õ(n 1.5) messages. while running in Õ( √n) rounds. While our lower bound results can be viewed as counterparts to the classical result of Awerbuch, Goldreich, Peleg, and Vainish [JACM 90], but for local problems, our algorithms are the first-known algorithms for coloring and MIS that take o(m) messages and run in polynomially many rounds. 

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