Variants of Homomorphism Polynomials Complete for Algebraic Complexity Classes

We present polynomial families complete for the well-studied algebraic complexity classes VF, VBP, VP, and VNP. The polynomial families are based on the homomorphism polynomials studied in the recent works of Durand et al. (2014) and Mahajan et al. (2018). We consider three different variants of graph homomorphisms, namely injective homomorphisms , directed homomorphisms , and injective directed homomorphisms , and obtain polynomial families complete for VF, VBP, VP, and VNP under each one of these. The polynomial families have the following properties: • The polynomial families complete for VF, VBP, and VP are model independent, i.e., they do not use a particular instance of a formula, algebraic branching programs, or circuit for characterising VF, VBP, or VP, respectively. • All the polynomial families are hard under p -projections.

On Proving Parameterized Size Lower Bounds for Multilinear Algebraic Models

We consider the problem of obtaining parameterized lower bounds for the size of arithmetic circuits computing polynomials with the degree of the polynomial as the parameter. We consider the following special classes of multilinear algebraic branching programs: 1) Read Once Oblivious Branching Programs (ROABPs), 2) Strict interval branching programs, 3) Sum of read once formulas with restricted ordering. We obtain parameterized lower bounds (i.e., nΩ(t(k)) lower bound for some function t of k) on the size of the above models computing a multilinear polynomial that can be computed by a depth four circuit of size g(k)nO(1) for some computable function g. Further, we obtain a parameterized separation between ROABPs and read-2 ABPs. This is obtained by constructing a degree k polynomial that can be computed by a read-2 ABP of small size such that the rank of the partial derivative matrix under any partition of the variables is large.