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There are only a few known general approaches for constructing explicit pseudorandom generators (PRGs). The "iterated restrictions" approach, pioneered by Ajtai and Wigderson [Ajtai and Wigderson, 1989], has provided PRGs with seed length polylog n or even Õ(log n) for several restricted models of computation. Can this approach ever achieve the optimal seed length of O(log n)? In this work, we answer this question in the affirmative. Using the iterated restrictions approach, we construct an explicit PRG for read-once depth-2 AC⁰[⊕] formulas with seed length O(log n) + Õ(log(1/ε)). In particular, we achieve optimal seed length O(log n) with near-optimal error ε = exp(-Ω̃(log n)). Even for constant error, the best prior PRG for this model (which includes read-once CNFs and read-once 𝔽₂-polynomials) has seed length Θ(log n ⋅ (log log n)²) [Chin Ho Lee, 2019]. A key step in the analysis of our PRG is a tail bound for subset-wise symmetric polynomials, a generalization of elementary symmetric polynomials. Like elementary symmetric polynomials, subset-wise symmetric polynomials provide a way to organize the expansion of ∏_{i=1}^m (1 + y_i). Elementary symmetric polynomials simply organize the terms by degree, i.e., they keep track of the number of variables participating in each monomial. Subset-wise symmetric polynomials keep track of more data: for a fixed partition of [m], they keep track of the number of variables from each subset participating in each monomial. Our tail bound extends prior work by Gopalan and Yehudayoff [Gopalan and Yehudayoff, 2014] on elementary symmetric polynomials. 

We initiate a study of the classification of approximation complexity of the eight-vertex model defined over 4-regular graphs. The eight-vertex model, together with its special case the six-vertex model, is one of the most extensively studied models in statistical physics, and can be stated as a problem of counting weighted orientations in graph theory. Our result concerns the approximability of the partition function on all 4-regular graphs, classified according to the parameters of the model. Our complexity results conform to the phase transition phenomenon from physics. We introduce a quantum decomposition of the eight-vertex model and prove a set of closure properties in various regions of the parameter space. Furthermore, we show that there are extra closure properties on 4-regular planar graphs. These regions of the parameter space are concordant with the phase transition threshold. Using these closure properties, we derive polynomial time approximation algorithms via Markov chain Monte Carlo. We also show that the eight-vertex model is NP-hard to approximate on the other side of the phase transition threshold.