String Matching: Communication, Circuits, and Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
String matching is the problem of deciding whether a given $n$-bit string contains a given $k$-bit pattern. We study the complexity of this problem in three settings. Communication complexity. For small $k$, we provide near-optimal upper and lower bounds on the communication complexity of string matching. For large $k$, our bounds leave open an exponential gap; we exhibit some evidence for the existence of a better protocol. Circuit complexity. We present several upper and lower bounds on the size of circuits with threshold and DeMorgan gates solving the string matching problem. Similarly to the above, our bounds are near-optimal for small $k$. Learning. We consider the problem of learning a hidden pattern of length at most $k$ relative to the classifier that assigns 1 to every string that contains the pattern. We prove optimal bounds on the VC dimension and sample complexity of this problem.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".