Hardness of Function Composition for Semantic Read once Branching Programs
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this work, we study time/space trade-offs for function composition. We prove asymptotically optimal lower bounds for function composition in the setting of nondeterministic read once branching programs, for the syntactic model as well as the stronger semantic model of read-once nondeterministic computation. We prove that such branching programs for solving the tree evaluation problem over an alphabet of size k requires size roughly k^{Omega(h)}, i.e space Omega(h log k). Our lower bound nearly matches the natural upper bound which follows the best strategy for black-white pebbling the underlying tree. While previous super-polynomial lower bounds have been proven for read-once nondeterministic branching programs (for both the syntactic as well as the semantic models), we give the first lower bounds for iterated function composition, and in these models our lower bounds are near optimal.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it