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Fast Learning Requires Good Memory: A Time-Space Lower Bound for Parity Learning

Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery

We prove that any algorithm for learning parities requires either a memory of quadratic size or an exponential number of samples. This proves a recent conjecture of Steinhardt, Valiant and Wager and shows that for some learning problems a large storage space is crucial. More formally, in the problem of parity learning, an unknown string $x \in \{0,1\}^n$ was chosen uniformly at random. A learner tries to learn $x$ from a stream of samples $(a_1, b_1), (a_2, b_2)... $, where each $a_t$ is uniformly distributed over $\{0,1\}^n$ and $b_t$ is the inner product of $a_t$ and $x$, modulo 2. We show that any algorithm for parity learning, that uses less than $n^2/25$ bits of memory, requires an exponential number of samples. Previously, there was no non-trivial lower bound on the number of samples needed, for any learning problem, even if the allowed memory size is $O(n)$ (where $n$ is the space needed to store one sample). We also give an application of our result in the field of bounded-storage cryptography. We show an encryption scheme that requires a private key of length $n$, as well as time complexity of $n$ per encryption/decryption of each bit, and is provenly and unconditionally secure as long as the attacker uses less than $n^2/25$ memory bits and the scheme is used at most an exponential number of times. Previous works on bounded-storage cryptography assumed that the memory size used by the attacker is at most linear in the time needed for encryption/decryption.

Mathematics; Computer science; Theoretical computer science

video/mp4

Author affiliation: Weizmann & IAS

2017-03-10

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/60852

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/