Sums of read-once formulas: How many summands suffice?

Abstract

An arithmetic read-once formula (ROF) is a formula (circuit of fan-out 1) over $+,\times$ where each variable labels at most one leaf. Every multilinear polynomial can be expressed as the sum of ROFs. In this work, we prove, for certain multilinear polynomials, a tight lower bound on the number of summands in such an expression.