Unstructured Hardness to Average-Case Randomness

Lijie Chen, Ron D. Rothblum, Roei Tell

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

The leading technical approach in uniform hardness-to-randomness in the last two decades faced several well-known barriers that caused results to rely on overly strong hardness assumptions, and yet still yield suboptimal conclusions. In this work we show uniform hardness-to-randomness results that simultaneously break through all of the known barriers. Specifically, consider any one of the following three assumptions: 1)For some ? > 0 there exists a function f computable by uniform circuits of size 2O(n) and depth 2o(n) such that f is hard for probabilistic time 2? n. 2)For every c ? N there exists a function f computable by logspace-uniform circuits of polynomial size and depth n2 such that every probabilistic algorithm running in time nc fails to compute f on a (1/n)-fraction of the inputs. 3)For every c ? N there exists a logspace-uniform family of arithmetic formulas of degree n2 over a field of size poly (n) such that no algorithm running in probabilistic time nc can evaluate the family on a worst-case input. Assuming any of these hypotheses, where the hardness is for every sufficiently large input length n ? N, we deduce that RP can be derandomized in polynomial time and on all input lengths, on average. Furthermore, under the first assumption we also show that BPP can be derandomized in polynomial time, on average and on all input lengths, with logarithmically many advice bits. On the way to these results we also resolve two related open problems. First, we obtain an optimal worst-case to average-case reduction for computing problems in linear space by uniform probabilistic algorithms; this result builds on a new instance checker based on the doubly efficient proof system of Goldwasser, Kalai, and Rothblum (J. ACM, 2015). Secondly, we resolve the main open problem in the work of Carmosino, Impagliazzo and Sabin (ICALP 2018), by deducing derandomization from weak and general fine-grained hardness hypotheses. The full version of this paper is available online [5].

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2022 IEEE 63rd Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2022
Pages429-437
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781665455190
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event63rd IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2022 - Denver, United States
Duration: 31 Oct 20223 Nov 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings - Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS
Volume2022-October

Conference

Conference63rd IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDenver
Period31/10/223/11/22

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Computer Science

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