Towards a proof of the Fourier-entropy conjecture? (Q2216459)

The total influence of a function is a central notion in the analysis of Boolean functions. The KKL theorem [\textit{J. Kahn} et al., ``The influence of variables on Boolean functions'', in: Proceedings of the 29th annual IEEE symposium on foundations of computer science, FOCS 1988. Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society Press. 68--80 (1988; \url{doi:10.1109/SFCS.1988.21923})] and the Friedgut junta theorem give strong characterizations of such functions whenever the bound on the total influence is \(o(\log n)\). However, both results become useless when the total influence of the function is \(\omega(\log n)\). The only case in which this logarithmic barrier has been broken for an interesting class of functions was proved by \textit{J. Bourgain} and \textit{G. Kalai} [Geom. Funct. Anal. 7, No. 3, 438--461 (1997; Zbl 0982.20004)], who focused on functions that are symmetric under large enough subgroups of \(S_n\). In this paper, the authors build and improve on the techniques of the Bourgain-Kalai paper and establish new concentration results on the Fourier spectrum of Boolean functions with small total influence. These results include a quantitative improvement of the Bourgain-Kalai result regarding the total influence of functions that are transitively symmetric and a slightly weaker version of the Fourier-entropy conjecture of \textit{E. Friedgut} and \textit{G. Kalai} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 124, No. 10, 2993--3002 (1996; Zbl 0864.05078)]. This establishes new bounds on the Fourier entropy of a Boolean function \(f\), as well as stronger bounds on the Fourier entropy of low-degree parts of \(f\). In particular, it implies that the Fourier spectrum of a constant variance Boolean function \(f\) is concentrated on \(2^{O(I[f] \log I[f])}\) characters, where \(I[f]\) denotes the total influence of \(f\), improving an earlier result of Friedgut. Removing the \(\log I[f]\) factor would essentially resolve the Fourier-entropy conjecture, as well as settle a conjecture of Mansour regarding the Fourier spectrum of polynomial-size DNF formulas. This concentration result for the Fourier spectrum of functions with small total influence also has new implications in learning theory. More specifically, it may be concluded that the class of functions whose total influence is at most \(K\) is agnostically learnable in time \(2^{(K \log K)}\) using membership queries. Thus, the class of functions with total influence \(O(\log n/ \log \log n)\) is agnostically learnable in \(\operatorname{poly}(n)\) time. Some comments and possible directions for future research conclude the paper.