Functional lower bounds for arithmetic circuits and connections to boolean circuit complexity

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Publication:5368767




Abstract: We say that a circuit C over a field F functionally computes an n-variate polynomial P if for every xin0,1n we have that C(x)=P(x). This is in contrast to syntactically computing P, when CequivP as formal polynomials. In this paper, we study the question of proving lower bounds for homogeneous depth-3 and depth-4 arithmetic circuits for functional computation. We prove the following results : 1. Exponential lower bounds homogeneous depth-3 arithmetic circuits for a polynomial in VNP. 2. Exponential lower bounds for homogeneous depth-4 arithmetic circuits with bounded individual degree for a polynomial in VNP. Our main motivation for this line of research comes from our observation that strong enough functional lower bounds for even very special depth-4 arithmetic circuits for the Permanent imply a separation between and ACC. Thus, improving the second result to get rid of the bounded individual degree condition could lead to substantial progress in boolean circuit complexity. Besides, it is known from a recent result of Kumar and Saptharishi [KS15] that over constant sized finite fields, strong enough average case functional lower bounds for homogeneous depth-4 circuits imply superpolynomial lower bounds for homogeneous depth-5 circuits. Our proofs are based on a family of new complexity measures called shifted evaluation dimension, and might be of independent interest.









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