Conditional Lower Bound for a System of Constant-Depth Proofs with Modular Connectives
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is known that constant-depth Frege proofs of some tautologies require exponential size. No such lower bound result is known for more general proof systems. We consider sequent calculus proofs in which formulas can contain modular connectives and only the cut formulas are restricted to be of constant depth. Under a plausible hardness assumption concerning small-depth Boolean circuits, we prove an exponential lower bound for such proofs. We prove this lower bound directly from the computational hardness assumption. By using the same approach, we obtain the following additional results. We provide a much simpler proof of a known (unconditional) lower bound in the case where only conjunctions and disjunctions are allowed. We establish a conditional exponential separation between the power of constant-depth proofs that use different modular connectives. Finally, under a plausible hardness assumption concerning the polynomial-time hierarchy, we show that the hierarchy G <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sub> * of quantified propositional proof systems does not collapse
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
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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