Tight Bounds for the Randomized and Quantum Communication Complexities of Equality with Small Error
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigate the randomized and quantum communication complexities of the well-studied Equality function with small error probability ε, getting the optimal constant factors in the leading terms in various different models. The following are our results in the randomized model: - We give a general technique to convert public-coin protocols to private-coin protocols by incurring a small multiplicative error at a small additive cost. This is an improvement over Newman’s theorem [Inf. Proc. Let.'91] in the dependence on the error parameter. - As a consequence we obtain a (log(n/ε²) + 4)-cost private-coin communication protocol that computes the n-bit Equality function, to error ε. This improves upon the log(n/ε³) + O(1) upper bound implied by Newman’s theorem, and matches the best known lower bound, which follows from Alon [Comb. Prob. Comput.'09], up to an additive log log(1/ε) + O(1). The following are our results in various quantum models: - We exhibit a one-way protocol with log(n/ε) + 4 qubits of communication for the n-bit Equality function, to error ε, that uses only pure states. This bound was implicitly already shown by Nayak [PhD thesis'99]. - We give a near-matching lower bound: any ε-error one-way protocol for n-bit Equality that uses only pure states communicates at least log(n/ε) - log log(1/ε) - O(1) qubits. - We exhibit a one-way protocol with log(√n/ε) + 3 qubits of communication that uses mixed states. This is tight up to additive log log(1/ε) + O(1), which follows from Alon’s result. - We exhibit a one-way entanglement-assisted protocol achieving error probability ε with ⌈log(1/ε)⌉ + 1 classical bits of communication and ⌈log(√n/ε)⌉ + 4 shared EPR-pairs between Alice and Bob. This matches the communication cost of the classical public coin protocol achieving the same error probability while improving upon the amount of prior entanglement that is needed for this protocol, which is ⌈log(n/ε)⌉ + O(1) shared EPR-pairs. Our upper bounds also yield upper bounds on the approximate rank, approximate nonnegative-rank, and approximate psd-rank of the Identity matrix. As a consequence we also obtain improved upper bounds on these measures for a function that was recently used to refute the randomized and quantum versions of the log-rank conjecture (Chattopadhyay, Mande and Sherif [J. ACM'20], Sinha and de Wolf [FOCS'19], Anshu, Boddu and Touchette [FOCS'19]).
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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