Expanders Meet Reed--Muller: Easy Instances of Noisy k-XOR
This resolves a key conjecture in computational complexity and pseudorandomness by showing expansion does not guarantee hardness for noisy k-XOR, with implications for lower bounds in models like Sum-of-Squares.
The paper tackles the noisy k-XOR problem by constructing an explicit family of graphs with near-optimal expansion for which the problem is solvable in polynomial time, disproving conjectures that expansion implies hardness, with results including polynomial-time solvability at constant noise rate η=1/3 for graphs with M=2^{O(log^2 N)} and k=(log N)^{O(1)}.
In the noisy $k$-XOR problem, one is given $y \in \mathbb{F}_2^M$ and must distinguish between $y$ uniform and $y = A x + e$, where $A$ is the adjacency matrix of a $k$-left-regular bipartite graph with $N$ variables and $M$ constraints, $x\in \mathbb{F}_2^N$ is random, and $e$ is noise with rate $η$. Lower bounds in restricted computational models such as Sum-of-Squares and low-degree polynomials are closely tied to the expansion of $A$, leading to conjectures that expansion implies hardness. We show that such conjectures are false by constructing an explicit family of graphs with near-optimal expansion for which noisy $k$-XOR is solvable in polynomial time. Our construction combines two powerful directions of work in pseudorandomness and coding theory that have not been previously put together. Specifically, our graphs are based on the lossless expanders of Guruswami, Umans and Vadhan (JACM 2009). Our key insight is that by an appropriate interpretation of the vertices of their graphs, the noisy XOR problem turns into the problem of decoding Reed-Muller codes from random errors. Then we build on a powerful body of work from the 2010s correcting from large amounts of random errors. Putting these together yields our construction. Concretely, we obtain explicit families for which noisy $k$-XOR is polynomial-time solvable at constant noise rate $η= 1/3$ for graphs with $M = 2^{O(\log^2 N)}$, $k = (\log N)^{O(1)}$, and $(N^{1-α}, 1-o(1))$-expansion. Under standard conjectures on Reed--Muller codes over the binary erasure channel, this extends to families with $M = N^{O(1)}$, $k=(\log N)^{O(1)}$, expansion $(N^{1-α}, 1-o(1))$ and polynomial-time algorithms at noise rate $η= N^{-c}$.