Upcoming Seminars

The talk will be about two classical problems in the theory of Carleman classes of smooth functions. The first one is to describe the image of a Carleman class under the Borel map (which maps a smooth function to its jet of Taylor coefficients at a given point). The second one concerns possible ways to construct a function in a given Carleman class with prescribed Taylor coefficients. I will present solutions to both problems. If time permits, I will also discuss related problems which originate in the singularity theory of Carleman classes.

I will talk about my joint work with Dave Benson which constructs new symmetric tensor categories in characteristic 2 arising from modular representation theory of elementary abelian 2-groups, and about its conjectural generalization to characteristic p>2. I will also discuss my work with Gelaki and Coulembier which shows that integral symmetric tensor categories in characteristic p>2 whose simple objects form a fusion category are super-Tannakian (i.e., representation categories of a supergroup scheme). 

The sharp threshold phenomenon is a central topic of research in the analysis of Boolean functions. Here, one aims to give sufficient conditions for a monotone Boolean function f to satisfy $\mu p(f)=o(\mu q(f))$, where $q = p + o(p)$, and $\mu p(f)$ is the probability that $f=1$ on an input with independent coordinates, each taking the value $1$ with probability $p$. The dense regime, where $\mu p(f)=\Theta(1)$, is somewhat understood due to seminal works by Bourgain, Friedgut, Hatami, and Kalai. On the other hand, the sparse regime where $\mu p(f)=o(1)$ was out of reach of the available methods. However, the potential power of the sparse regime was envisioned by Kahn and Kalai already in 2006. In this talk we show that if a monotone Boolean function $f$ with $\mu p(f)=o(1)$ satisfies some mild pseudo-randomness conditions then it exhibits a sharp threshold in the interval $[p,q]$, with $q = p+o(p)$. More specifically, our mild pseudo-randomness hypothesis is that the $p$-biased measure of $f$ does not bump up to $\Theta(1)$ whenever we restrict $f$ to a sub-cube of constant co-dimension, and our conclusion is that we can find $q=p+o(p)$, such that $\mu p(f)=o(\mu q(f))$ At its core, this theorem stems from a novel hypercontactive theorem for Boolean functions satisfying pseudorandom conditions, which we call `small generalized influences'. This result takes on the role of the usual hypercontractivity theorem, but is significantly more effective in the regime where $p = o(1)$. We demonstrate the power of our sharp threshold result by reproving the recent breakthrough result of Frankl on the celebrated Erdos matching conjecture, and by proving conjectures of Huang--Loh--Sudakov and Furedi--Jiang for a new wide range of the parameters. Based on a joint work with Keevash, Long, and Minzer.

We explore the power of interactive proofs with a distributed verifier. In this setting, the verifier consists of n nodes and a graph G that defines their communication pattern. The prover is a single entity that communicates with all nodes by short messages. The goal is to verify that the graph G belongs to some language in a small number of rounds, and with small communication bound, i.e., the proof size.

This interactive model was introduced by Kol, Oshman and Saxena (PODC 2018) as a generalization of non-interactive distributed proofs. They demonstrated the power of interaction in this setting by constructing protocols for problems as Graph Symmetry and Graph Non-Isomorphism -- both of which require proofs of (n^2)-bits without interaction.

In this work, we provide a new general framework for distributed interactive proofs that allows one to translate standard interactive protocols (i.e., with a centralized verifier) to ones where the verifier is distributed with a proof size that depends on the computational complexity of the verification algorithm run by the centralized verifier. We show the following:

* Every (centralized) computation performed in time O(n) on a RAM can be translated into three-round distributed interactive protocol with O(log n) proof size. This implies that many graph problems for sparse graphs have succinct proofs (e.g., testing planarity).

* Every (centralized) computation implemented by either a small space or by uniform NC circuit can be translated into a distributed protocol with O(1) rounds and O(log n) bits proof size for the low space case and polylog(n) many rounds and proof size for NC.

* We show that for Graph Non-Isomorphism, one of the striking demonstrations of the power of interaction, there is a 4-round protocol with O(log n) proof size, improving upon the O(n*log n) proof size of Kol et al.

* For many problems, we show how to reduce proof size below the seemingly natural barrier of log n. By employing our RAM compiler, we get a 5-round protocol with proof size O(loglog n) for a family of problems including Fixed Automorphism, Clique and Leader Election (for the latter two problems we actually get O(1) proof size).

* Finally, we discuss how to make these proofs non-interactive {\em arguments} via random oracles.

Our compilers capture many natural problems and demonstrate the difficulty in showing lower bounds in these regimes.
Joint work with Moni Naor and Merav Parter.