License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2021.7
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-135464
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2021/13546/
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Hoza, William M. ; Pyne, Edward ; Vadhan, Salil

Pseudorandom Generators for Unbounded-Width Permutation Branching Programs

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LIPIcs-ITCS-2021-7.pdf (0.6 MB)

Abstract

We prove that the Impagliazzo-Nisan-Wigderson [Impagliazzo et al., 1994] pseudorandom generator (PRG) fools ordered (read-once) permutation branching programs of unbounded width with a seed length of Õ(log d + log n ⋅ log(1/ε)), assuming the program has only one accepting vertex in the final layer. Here, n is the length of the program, d is the degree (equivalently, the alphabet size), and ε is the error of the PRG. In contrast, we show that a randomly chosen generator requires seed length Ω(n log d) to fool such unbounded-width programs. Thus, this is an unusual case where an explicit construction is "better than random."
Except when the program’s width w is very small, this is an improvement over prior work. For example, when w = poly(n) and d = 2, the best prior PRG for permutation branching programs was simply Nisan’s PRG [Nisan, 1992], which fools general ordered branching programs with seed length O(log(wn/ε) log n). We prove a seed length lower bound of Ω̃(log d + log n ⋅ log(1/ε)) for fooling these unbounded-width programs, showing that our seed length is near-optimal. In fact, when ε ≤ 1/log n, our seed length is within a constant factor of optimal. Our analysis of the INW generator uses the connection between the PRG and the derandomized square of Rozenman and Vadhan [Rozenman and Vadhan, 2005] and the recent analysis of the latter in terms of unit-circle approximation by Ahmadinejad et al. [Ahmadinejad et al., 2020].

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{hoza_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2021.7,
  author =	{William M. Hoza and Edward Pyne and Salil Vadhan},
  title =	{{Pseudorandom Generators for Unbounded-Width Permutation Branching Programs}},
  booktitle =	{12th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2021)},
  pages =	{7:1--7:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-177-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2021},
  volume =	{185},
  editor =	{James R. Lee},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2021/13546},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-135464},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2021.7},
  annote =	{Keywords: Pseudorandom generators, permutation branching programs}
}

Keywords: Pseudorandom generators, permutation branching programs
Collection: 12th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2021)
Issue Date: 2021
Date of publication: 04.02.2021

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