Avi Wigderson received the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for his decades of intellectual leadership in ...

Algorithmic contract design is a new frontier at the interface of economics and computation, studying scenarios where a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent or a team of agents, and incentivizes them through a contract that ...

Turing-complete blockchain protocols approximate the idealized abstraction of a "computer in the sky" that is open access, runs in plain view, and, in effect, has no owner or operator. This technology can, among other things, enable stronger notions of ...

We show that the Maximum Weight Independent Set problem (MWIS) can be solved in quasi-polynomial time on H-free graphs (graphs excluding a fixed graph H as an induced subgraph) for every H whose every connected component is a path or a subdivided claw (...

We introduce a new approach for designing Random-order Contention Resolution Schemes (RCRS’s) via exact solution in continuous time. Given a function c(y):[0,1] → [0,1], we show how to select each element which arrives at time y ∈ [0,1] with probability ...

We consider the communication complexity of some fundamental convex optimization problems in the point-to-point (coordinator) and blackboard communication models. We strengthen known bounds for approximately solving linear regression, p-norm regression (...

Most of the literature on online algorithms and sequential decision-making focuses on settings with “irrevocable decisions” where the algorithm’s decision upon arrival of the new input is set in stone and can never change in the future. One canonical ...

We study algorithms for estimating the size of maximum matching. This problem has been subject to extensive research. For n-vertex graphs, Bhattacharya, Kiss, and Saranurak [FOCS’23] (BKS) showed that an estimate that is within є n of the optimal ...

We continue the study of doubly-efficient proof systems for verifying agnostic PAC learning, for which we obtain the following results. We construct an interactive protocol for learning the t largest Fourier characters of a given function f ∶ {0,1}ⁿ → {0,...

We design an almost linear-size sketching scheme for computing edit distance up to a given threshold k. The scheme consists of two algorithms, a sketching algorithm and a recovery algorithm. The sketching algorithm depends on the parameter k and takes as ...

A recent work by Christiansen, Nowicki, and Rotenberg [STOC’23] provides dynamic algorithms for coloring sparse graphs, concretely as a function of the graph’s arboricity α. They give two randomized algorithms: O(α logα) implicit coloring in poly(logn) ...

The local behavior of typical solutions of random constraint satisfaction problems (csp) describes many important phenomena including clustering thresholds, decay of correlations, and the behavior of message passing algorithms. When the constraint ...

We introduce and study swap cosystolic expansion, a new expansion property of simplicial complexes. We prove lower bounds for swap coboundary expansion of spherical buildings and use them to lower bound swap cosystolic expansion of the LSV Ramanujan ...

Quantum copy protection, introduced by Aaronson, enables giving out a quantum program-description that cannot be meaningfully duplicated. Despite over a decade of study, copy protection is only known to be possible for a very limited class of programs. ...

A compression problem is defined with respect to an efficient encoding function f; given a string x, our task is to find the shortest y such that f(y) = x. The obvious brute-force algorithm for solving this compression task on n-bit strings runs in time ...

Recent language models generate false but plausible-sounding text with surprising frequency. Such “hallucinations” are an obstacle to the usability of language-based AI systems and can harm people who rely upon their outputs. This work shows that there ...

We study the efficient learnability of low-degree polynomial threshold functions (PTFs) in the presence of a constant fraction of adversarial corruptions. Our main algorithmic result is a polynomial-time PAC learning algorithm for this concept class in ...

Batch proofs are proof systems that convince a verifier that x₁,…,x_t ∈ L, for some NP language L, with communication that is much shorter than sending the t witnesses. In the case of statistical soundness (where the cheating prover is unbounded but the ...

In a prophet inequality problem, n independent random variables are presented to a gambler one by one. The gambler decides when to stop the sequence and obtains the most recent value as reward. We evaluate a stopping rule by the worst-case ratio between ...

We provide compelling evidence for the potential of hardness-vs.-randomness approaches to make progress on the long-standing problem of derandomizing space-bounded computation. Our first contribution is a derandomization of bounded-space machines from ...