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• Marco Carmosino
• (Boston University)
• LEARN-Uniform Circuit Lower Bounds and Provability in Bounded Arithmetic
• Abstract:
• We investigate randomized LEARN-uniformity, which captures the power of randomness and equivalence queries (EQ) in the construction of Boolean circuits for an explicit problem. This is an intermediate notion between P-uniformity and non-uniformity motivated by connections to learning, complexity, and logic. Building on a number of techniques, we establish the first unconditional lower bounds against LEARN-uniform circuits. For example:

For each k >= 1, there is a language L in NP such that circuits for L of size O(n^k) cannot be learned in deterministic polynomial time with access to n^o(1) EQs.

We employ such results to investigate the (un)provability of non-uniform circuit upper bounds (e.g., Is NP contained in SIZE[n^3]?) in theories of bounded arithmetic. Some questions of this form have been addressed in recent papers of Krajicek-Oliveira (2017), Muller-Bydzovsky (2020), and Bydzovsky-Krajicek-Oliveira (2020) via a mixture of techniques from proof theory, complexity theory, and model theory. In contrast, by extracting computational information from proofs via a direct translation to LEARN-uniformity, we establish robust unprovability theorems that unify, simplify, and extend nearly all previous results. In addition, our lower bounds against randomized LEARN-uniformity yield unprovability results for theories augmented with the dual weak pigeonhole principle, such as APC^1 (Jerabek, 2007), which is known to formalize a large fragment of modern complexity theory.

Finally, we make precise potential limitations of theories of bounded arithmetic such as PV (Cook, 1975) and Jerabek's theory APC^1, by showing unconditionally that these theories cannot prove statements like "NP is not contained in BPP, and NP is contained in ioP/poly", i.e., that NP is uniformly "hard" but non-uniformly "easy" on infinitely many input lengths. In other words, if we live in such a complexity world, then this cannot be established feasibly.

• 14.06.21   15:45
• Iddo Tzameret
• (Imperial College London)
• A Diagonalization-Based Approach to Proof Complexity
• Abstract:
• We propose a diagonalization-based approach to several important questions in proof complexity. We illustrate this approach in the context of the algebraic proof system IPS and in the context of propositional proof systems more generally.

We use the approach to give an explicit sequence of CNF formulas phi_n such that VNP \neq VP iff there are no polynomial-size IPS proofs for the formulas phi_n. This provides the first natural equivalence between proof complexity lower bounds and standard algebraic complexity lower bounds. Our proof of this fact uses the implication from IPS lower bounds to algebraic complexity lower bounds due to Grochow and Pitassi together with a diagonalization argument: the formulas phi_n themselves assert the non-existence of short IPS proofs for formulas encoding VNP \neq VP at a different input length. Our result also has meta-mathematical implications: it gives evidence for the difficulty of proving strong lower bounds for IPS within IPS.

For any strong enough propositional proof system R, we define the *iterated R-lower bound formulas*, which inductively assert the non-existence of short R proofs for formulas encoding the same statement at a different input length, and propose them as explicit hard candidates for the proof system R. We observe that this hypothesis holds for Resolution following recent results of Atserias and Muller and of Garlik, and give evidence in favour of it for other proof systems.

Joint work with Rahul Santhanam

• 07.06.21   15:45

Pavel Pudlak, Neil Thapen, Jan Krají?ek
organizers

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