Mildly Exponential Lower Bounds on Tolerant Testers for Monotonicity, Unateness, and Juntas

by Xi Chen, Anindya De, Yuhao Li, Shivam Nadimpalli, Rocco A. Servedio

Oded's comments

Not clear why I missed this wonderful result. I guess it is a consequence of not following arXiv, which I find quite unfriendly, and not following the friendly Property Tesing Review well enough.

As far as I know this is the first significant separation between tolerant and standard testing obtained via a natural property, alas it refers only to non-adaptove testers. In contrast, prior seprataions, which follow Fischer and Fortnow (2006), embed a PCP system in the property.

The original abstract (slightly revised to avoid setting complex math expressions)

We give the first super-polynomial (in fact, mildly exponential) lower bounds for tolerant testing (equivalently, distance estimation) of monotonicity, unateness, and juntas with a constant separation between the "yes" and "no" cases. Specifically, we give

In the constant-gap regime no non-trivial prior lower bound was known for monotonicity, the best prior lower bound known for unateness was Omega(n sup 3/2) queries, and the best prior lower bound known for juntas was poly(k) queries.

See arXiv 2309.12513


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