Monotone Circuit Lower Bounds from Robust Sunflowers

Abstract

Robust sunflowers are a generalization of combinatorial sunflowers that have applications in monotone circuit complexity, DNF sparsification, randomness extractors, and recent advances on the Erdős-Rado sunflower conjecture. The recent breakthrough of Alweiss, Lovett, Wu and Zhang gives an improved bound on the maximum size of a $w$-set system that excludes a robust sunflower. In this paper, we use this result to obtain an $\exp (n^{1/2-o(1)})$ lower bound on the monotone circuit size of an explicit $n$-variate monotone function, improving the previous best known $\exp (n^{1/3-o(1)})$ due to Andreev and Harnik and Raz. We also show an $\exp (\Omega (n))$ lower bound on the monotone arithmetic circuit size of a related polynomial. Finally, we introduce a notion of robust clique-sunflowers and use this to prove an $n^{\Omega (k)}$ lower bound on the monotone circuit size of the CLIQUE function for all $k\le n^{1/3-o(1)}$, strengthening the bound of Alon and Boppana.

Journal version

References in corpus (4)

• Note on Sunflowers
• Strongly Exponential Separation Between Monotone VP and Monotone VNP
• Coding for Sunflowers
• From DNF compression to sunflower theorems via regularity