activity
20242026
collaborators

7 papers

cs.CC2026

Rigorous Implications of the Low-Degree Heuristic

Jun-Ting Hsieh, Daniel M. Kane, Pravesh K. Kothari +3

Over the past decade, the low-degree heuristic has been used to estimate the algorithmic thresholds for a wide range of average-case planted vs null distinguishing problems. Such r…

cs.DS2025

Smooth Trade-off for Tensor PCA via Sharp Bounds for Kikuchi Matrices

Pravesh K. Kothari, Jeff Xu

In this work, we revisit algorithms for Tensor PCA: given an order- tensor of the form where is a random symmetric Gaussian tensor with unit var…

cs.DS2025

Sparsifying Sums of Positive Semidefinite Matrices

Arpon Basu, Pravesh K. Kothari, Yang P. Liu +1

In this paper, we revisit spectral sparsification for sums of arbitrary positive semidefinite (PSD) matrices. Concretely, for any collection of PSD matrices $\mathcal{A} = \{A_1, A…

cs.CC2025

The Quasi-Polynomial Low-Degree Conjecture is False

Rares-Darius Buhai, Jun-Ting Hsieh, Aayush Jain +1

There is a growing body of work on proving hardness results for average-case estimation problems by bounding the low-degree advantage (LDA) - a quantitative estimate of the closene…

cs.DS2025

Sum-Of-Squares To Approximate Knapsack

Pravesh K. Kothari, Sherry Sarkar

These notes give a self-contained exposition of Karlin, Mathieu and Nguyen's tight estimate of the integrality gap of the sum-of-squares semidefinite program for solving the knapsa…

cs.CC2024

Improved Lower Bounds for all Odd-Query Locally Decodable Codes

Arpon Basu, Jun-Ting Hsieh, Pravesh K. Kothari +1

We prove that for every odd , any -query binary, possibly non-linear locally decodable code (-LDC) must satisfy $k \leq \tilde{…