We provide an exposition of three Lemmas which relate
general properties of distributions
with the exclusive-or of certain bit locations.

The first XOR-Lemma, commonly attributed to U.V. Vazirani,
relates the statistical distance of a distribution from uniform
to the maximum bias of the xor of certain bit positions.
The ... more >>>

We study the problem of non-interactive correlation distillation
(NICD). Suppose Alice and Bob each has a string, denoted by
$A=a_0a_1\cdots a_{n-1}$ and $B=b_0b_1\cdots b_{n-1}$,
respectively. Furthermore, for every $k=0,1,...,n-1$, $(a_k,b_k)$ is
independently drawn from a distribution $\noise$, known as the ``noise
mode''. Alice and Bob wish to ``distill'' the correlation
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The combination of two major challenges in machine learning is investigated: dealing with large amounts of irrelevant information and learning from noisy data. It is shown that large classes of Boolean concepts that depend on a small number of variables---so-called juntas---can be learned efficiently from random examples corrupted by random ... more >>>

For Boolean functions that are $\epsilon$-far from the set of linear functions, we study the lower bound on the rejection probability (denoted $\textsc{rej}(\epsilon)$) of the linearity test suggested by Blum, Luby and Rubinfeld. The interest in this problem is partly due to its relation to PCP constructions and hardness of ... more >>>

This paper addresses the problem of testing whether a Boolean-valued function f is a halfspace, i.e. a function of the form f(x)=sgn(w ⋅ x - θ). We consider halfspaces over the continuous domain R^n (endowed with the standard multivariate Gaussian distribution) as well as halfspaces over the Boolean cube {-1,1}^n ... more >>>

We consider the task of testing properties of Boolean functions that
are invariant under linear transformations of the Boolean cube. Previous
work in property testing, including the linearity test and the test
for Reed-Muller codes, has mostly focused on such tasks for linear
properties. The one exception is a test ... more >>>

A hypergraph dictatorship test is first introduced by Samorodnitsky
and Trevisan and serves as a key component in
their unique games based $\PCP$ construction. Such a test has oracle
access to a collection of functions and determines whether all the
functions are the same dictatorship, or all their low degree ... more >>>

A classic result due to Hastad established that for every constant \eps > 0, given an overdetermined system of linear equations over a finite field \F_q where each equation depends on exactly 3 variables and at least a fraction (1-\eps) of the equations can be satisfied, it is NP-hard to ... more >>>

We present a Fourier-analytic approach to list-decoding Reed-Muller codes over arbitrary finite fields. We prove that the list-decoding radius for quadratic polynomials equals $1 - 2/q$ over any field $F_q$ where $q > 2$. This confirms a conjecture due to Gopalan, Klivans and Zuckerman for degree $2$. Previously, tight bounds ... more >>>

The relationship between BQP and PH has been an open problem since the earliest days of quantum computing. We present evidence that quantum computers can solve problems outside the entire polynomial hierarchy, by relating this question to topics in circuit complexity, pseudorandomness, and Fourier analysis.

First, we show that there ... more >>>

Is there a general theorem that tells us when we can hope for exponential speedups from quantum algorithms, and when we cannot? In this paper, we make two advances toward such a theorem, in the black-box model where most quantum algorithms operate.

First, we show that for any problem that ... more >>>

Call a function $f: \mathbb{F}_2^n \to \{0,1\}$ odd-cycle-free if there are no $x_1, \dots, x_k \in \mathbb{F}_2^n$ with $k$ an odd integer such that $f(x_1) = \cdots = f(x_k) = 1$ and $x_1 + \cdots + x_k = 0$. We show that one can distinguish odd-cycle-free functions from those $\epsilon$-far ... more >>>