A Quadratic Size-Hierarchy Theorem for Small-Depth Multilinear Formulas

Arithmetic formulas are directed trees where the leaves are labelled by variables and elements of the field, and internal vertices are labelled by + or x. Every internal vertex computes a polynomial by operating on its inputs. It is easy to see that they are a natural model of computation of polynomials, syntactically (symbolically). The size of the arithmetic formulas refers to the number of + and x operations needed to compute the polynomial.

Rephrasing the question in the algebraic setting we ask the following: for any s, \varepsilon >0, are there polynomial computations that can be efficiently computed by arithmetic formulas of size s but not by any arithmetic formula of size s^{1-\varepsilon}?

In this talk, we will restrict ourselves to arithmetic formulas where computation at every vertex is a multilinear polynomial and here we show explicit separations between the expressive powers of multilinear formulas of small-depth and all polynomial sizes. The multilinear restriction is a reasonable one since most polynomials of interest are indeed multilinear.

Formally, we will show that for any s = poly(n) and \delta > 0, we show that there are explicit polynomial families that have multilinear formulas of size at most s but no 'small'-depth multilinear formulas of size less than s^{0.5 - \delta}. Our proof can be viewed as a derandomization of a lower bound technique of Raz (JACM 2009) using \epsilon-biased spaces.

(Joint work with Nutan Limaye and Srikanth Srinivasan. Appeared in the proceedings of ICALP 2018.)