Title
Polynomially Low Error PCPs with polyloglog n Queries via Modular Composition
Abstract
We show that every language in NP has a PCP verifier that tosses O(log n) random coins, has perfect completeness, and a soundness error of at most 1/poly(n), while making O(poly log log n) queries into a proof over an alphabet of size at most n1/poly log log n. Previous constructions that obtain 1/poly(n) soundness error used either poly log n queries or an exponential alphabet, i.e. of size 2nc for some c> 0. Our result is an exponential improvement in both parameters simultaneously. Our result can be phrased as polynomial-gap hardness for approximate CSPs with arity poly log log n and alphabet size n1/poly log n. The ultimate goal, in this direction, would be to prove polynomial hardness for CSPs with constant arity and polynomial alphabet size (aka the sliding scale conjecture for inverse polynomial soundness error). Our construction is based on a modular generalization of previous PCP constructions in this parameter regime, which involves a composition theorem that uses an extra 'consistency' query but maintains the inverse polynomial relation between the soundness error and the alphabet size. Our main technical/conceptual contribution is a new notion of soundness, which we refer to as distributional soundness, that replaces the previous notion of \"list decoding soundness\", and allows us to invoke composition a super-constant number of times without incurring a blow-up in the soundness error.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2746539.2746630
Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC)
Keywords
Field
DocType
PCPs,composition,sliding scale conjecture,decodable PCPs
Discrete mathematics,Inverse,Binary logarithm,Combinatorics,Arity,Polynomial,Soundness,List decoding,Completeness (statistics),Conjecture,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
abs/1505.06362
0737-8017
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.40
18
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Irit Dinur1118785.67
Prahladh Harsha237132.06
Guy Kindler351532.02