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Main Authors: Ben-David, Shalev, Blais, Eric
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08268
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author Ben-David, Shalev
Blais, Eric
author_facet Ben-David, Shalev
Blais, Eric
contents We establish two new direct product theorems for the randomized query complexity of Boolean functions. The first shows that computing $n$ copies of a function $f$, even with a small success probability of $γ^n$, requires $Θ(n)$ times the "maximum distributional" query complexity of $f$ with success parameter $γ$. This result holds for all success parameters $γ$, even when $γ$ is very close to $1/2$ or to $1$. As a result, it unifies and generalizes Drucker's direct product theorem (2012) for $γ$ bounded away from $\frac12$ and $1$ as well as the strong direct sum theorem of Blais and Brody (2019) for $γ\approx 1-1/n$. The second establishes a general "list decoding" direct product theorem that captures many different variants of partial computation tasks related to the function $f^n$ consisting of $n$ copies of $f$. Notably, our list decoding direct product theorem yields a new threshold direct product theorem and other new variants such as the labelled-threshold direct product theorem. Both of these direct product theorems are obtained by taking a new approach. Instead of directly analyzing the query complexity of algorithms, we introduce a new measure of complexity of functions that we call "discounted score". We show that this measure satisfies a number of useful structural properties, including tensorization, that make it particularly suitable for the study of direct product questions.
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spellingShingle Direct Product Theorems for Randomized Query Complexity
Ben-David, Shalev
Blais, Eric
Computational Complexity
We establish two new direct product theorems for the randomized query complexity of Boolean functions. The first shows that computing $n$ copies of a function $f$, even with a small success probability of $γ^n$, requires $Θ(n)$ times the "maximum distributional" query complexity of $f$ with success parameter $γ$. This result holds for all success parameters $γ$, even when $γ$ is very close to $1/2$ or to $1$. As a result, it unifies and generalizes Drucker's direct product theorem (2012) for $γ$ bounded away from $\frac12$ and $1$ as well as the strong direct sum theorem of Blais and Brody (2019) for $γ\approx 1-1/n$. The second establishes a general "list decoding" direct product theorem that captures many different variants of partial computation tasks related to the function $f^n$ consisting of $n$ copies of $f$. Notably, our list decoding direct product theorem yields a new threshold direct product theorem and other new variants such as the labelled-threshold direct product theorem. Both of these direct product theorems are obtained by taking a new approach. Instead of directly analyzing the query complexity of algorithms, we introduce a new measure of complexity of functions that we call "discounted score". We show that this measure satisfies a number of useful structural properties, including tensorization, that make it particularly suitable for the study of direct product questions.
title Direct Product Theorems for Randomized Query Complexity
topic Computational Complexity
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08268