Deterministic identity testing paradigms for bounded top-fanin depth-4 circuits

Polynomial Identity Testing (PIT) is a fundamental computational problem. The famous depth-4 reduction (Agrawal & Vinay, FOCS'08) has made PIT for depth-4 circuits, an enticing pursuit. The largely open special-cases of sum-product-of-sum-of-univariates (Σ[k]ΠΣ∧) and sum-product-of-constant-degree-polynomials (Σ[k]ΠΣΠδ), for constants k, δ, have been a source of many great ideas in the last two decades. For eg. depth-3 ideas (Dvir & Shpilka, STOC'05; Kayal & Saxena, CCC'06; Saxena & Seshadhri, FOCS'10, STOC'11); depth-4 ideas (Beecken, Mittmann & Saxena, ICALP'11; Saha, Saxena & Saptharishi, Comput.Compl.'13; Forbes, FOCS'15; Kumar & Saraf, CCC'16); geometric Sylvester-Gallai ideas (Kayal & Saraf, FOCS'09; Shpilka, STOC'19; Peleg & Shpilka, CCC'20, STOC'21). We solve two of the basic underlying open problems in this work. We give the first polynomial-time PIT for (Σ[k]ΠΣ∧). Further, we give the first quasipolynomial time blackbox PIT for both (Σ[k]ΠΣ∧) and (Σ[k]ΠΣΠδ). No subexponential time algorithm was known prior to this work (even if k = δ = 3). A key technical ingredient in all the three algorithms is how the logarithmic derivative, and its power-series, modify the top Π-gate to ∧.

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