Relative-error testing of conjunctions and decision lists.
X. Chen and W. Pires and T. Pitassi and R. Servedio.
In International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP), 2025, to appear.


Abstract:

We study the \emph{relative-error} property testing model for Boolean functions that was recently introduced in the work of \cite{CDHLNSY2024}. In relative-error testing, the testing algorithm gets uniform random satisfying assignments as well as black-box queries to $f$, and it must accept $f$ with high probability whenever $f$ has the property that is being tested and reject any $f$ that is \emph{relative-error} far from having the property. Here the relative-error distance from $f$ to a function $g$ is measured with respect to $|f^{-1}(1)|$ rather than with respect to the entire domain size $2^n$ as in the Hamming distance measure that is used in the standard model; thus, unlike the standard model, relative-error testing allows us to study the testability of \emph{sparse} Boolean functions that have few satisfying assignments. It was shown in \cite{CDHLNSY2024} that relative-error testing is at least as difficult as standard-model property testing, but for many natural and important Boolean function classes the precise relationship between the two notions is unknown.

In this paper we consider the well-studied and fundamental properties of being a \emph{conjunction} and being a \emph{decision list}. In the relative-error setting, we give an efficient one-sided error tester for conjunctions with running time and query complexity $O(1/\epsilon)$.

Secondly, we give a two-sided relative-error $\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon)$ tester for decision lists, matching the query complexity of the state-of-the-art algorithm in the standard model \cite{Bshouty20,DLM+:07}.

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