Learning Generalized Depth Three Arithmetic Circuits in the Non-Degenerate Case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An s-sparse polynomial has at most s monomials with nonzero coefficients. The Equivalence Testing problem for sparse polynomials (ETsparse) asks to decide if a given polynomial f is equivalent to (i.e., in the orbit of) some s-sparse polynomial. In other words, given f ∈ 𝔽[𝐱] and s ∈ ℕ, ETsparse asks to check if there exist A ∈ GL(|𝐱|, 𝔽) and 𝐛 ∈ 𝔽^|𝐱| such that f(A𝐱 + 𝐛) is s-sparse. We show that ETsparse is NP-hard over any field 𝔽, if f is given in the sparse representation, i.e., as a list of nonzero coefficients and exponent vectors. This answers a question posed by Gupta, Saha and Thankey (SODA 2023) and also, more explicitly, by Baraskar, Dewan and Saha (STACS 2024). The result implies that the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) is NP-hard for a dense subclass of depth-3 arithmetic circuits if the input is given in sparse representation. We also show that approximating the smallest s₀ such that a given s-sparse polynomial f is in the orbit of some s₀-sparse polynomial to within a factor of s^{1/3 - ε} is NP-hard for any ε > 0; observe that s-factor approximation is trivial as the input is s-sparse. Finally, we show that for any constant σ ≥ 6, checking if a polynomial (given in sparse representation) is in the orbit of some support-σ polynomial is NP-hard. Support of a polynomial f is the maximum number of variables present in any monomial of f. These results are obtained via direct reductions from the 3-SAT problem.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".