Interpolating Arithmetic Read-Once Formulas in Parallel

A formula is read-once if each variable appears in it at most once. An arithmetic formula is one in which the operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division (and constants are allowed). We present a randomized (Las Vegas) parallel algorithm for the exact interpolation of arithmetic read-once formulas over sufficiently large fields. More specifically, for $n$-variable read-once formulas and fields of size at least 3(n2+3n-2), our algorithm runs in $O(\log^2 n)$ parallel steps using O(n4) processors (where the field operations are charged unit cost). This complements some results from [N. H. Bshouty and R. Cleve, Proc. 33rd Annual Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science, IEEE Computer Science Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1992, pp. 24--27] which imply that other classes of read-once formulas cannot be interpolated---or even learned with membership and equivalence queries---in polylogarithmic time with polynomially many processors (even though they can be learned sequentially in polynomial time). These classes include boolean read-once formulas and arithmetic read-once formulas over fields of size $o(n / \log n)$ (for n variable read-once formulas).