Pseudorandomness and Fourier growth bounds for width 3 branching programs

Citation:

Steinke, Thomas, Salil Vadhan, and Andrew Wan. “Pseudorandomness and Fourier growth bounds for width 3 branching programs.” Theory of Computing – Special Issue on APPROX-RANDOM 2014 13, no. 12 (2017): 1-50.

Abstract:

Version History: a conference version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Randomization and Computation (RANDOM'14). Full version posted as ECCC TR14-076 and arXiv:1405.7028 [cs.CC].

We present an explicit pseudorandom generator for oblivious, read-once, width-3 branching programs, which can read their input bits in any order. The generator has seed length \(Õ(\log^3 n)\).The previously best known seed length for this model is \(n^{1/2+o(1)}\) due to Impagliazzo, Meka, and Zuckerman (FOCS ’12). Our work generalizes a recent result of Reingold, Steinke, and Vadhan (RANDOM ’13) for permutation branching programs. The main technical novelty underlying our generator is a new bound on the Fourier growth of width-3, oblivious, read-once branching programs. Specifically, we show that for any \(f : \{0, 1\}^n → \{0, 1\}\) computed by such a branching program, and \(k ∈ [n]\),

 \(\displaystyle\sum_{s⊆[n]:|s|=k} \big| \hat{f}[s] \big | ≤n^2 ·(O(\log n))^k\),

where \(\hat{f}[s] = \mathbb{E}_U [f[U] \cdot (-1)^{s \cdot U}]\) is the standard Fourier transform over \(\mathbb{Z}^n_2\). The base \(O(\log n)\) of the Fourier growth is tight up to a factor of \(\log \log n\).

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 06/30/2020