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Title: A Polynomial Degree Bound on Equations for Non-rigid Matrices and Small Linear Circuits
We show that there is an equation of degree at most poly( n ) for the (Zariski closure of the) set of the non-rigid matrices: That is, we show that for every large enough field 𝔽, there is a non-zero n 2 -variate polynomial P ε 𝔽[ x 1, 1 , ..., x n, n ] of degree at most poly( n ) such that every matrix M that can be written as a sum of a matrix of rank at most n /100 and a matrix of sparsity at most n 2 /100 satisfies P(M) = 0. This confirms a conjecture of Gesmundo, Hauenstein, Ikenmeyer, and Landsberg [ 9 ] and improves the best upper bound known for this problem down from exp ( n 2 ) [ 9 , 12 ] to poly( n ). We also show a similar polynomial degree bound for the (Zariski closure of the) set of all matrices M such that the linear transformation represented by M can be computed by an algebraic circuit with at most n 2 /200 edges (without any restriction on the depth). As far as we are aware, no such bound was known prior to this work when more » the depth of the circuits is unbounded. Our methods are elementary and short and rely on a polynomial map of Shpilka and Volkovich [ 21 ] to construct low-degree “universal” maps for non-rigid matrices and small linear circuits. Combining this construction with a simple dimension counting argument to show that any such polynomial map has a low-degree annihilating polynomial completes the proof. As a corollary, we show that any derandomization of the polynomial identity testing problem will imply new circuit lower bounds. A similar (but incomparable) theorem was proved by Kabanets and Impagliazzo [ 11 ]. « less
Authors:
;
Award ID(s):
1705028
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10389722
Journal Name:
ACM Transactions on Computation Theory
Volume:
14
Issue:
2
Page Range or eLocation-ID:
1 to 14
ISSN:
1942-3454
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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