The spectral norm of a Boolean function f : {0, 1} n → {−1, 1} is the sum of the absolute values of its Fourier coefficients. This quantity provides useful upper and lower bounds on the complexity of a function in areas such as learning theory, circuit complexity, and communication complexity. In this paper, we give a combinatorial characterization for the spectral norm of symmetric functions. We show that the logarithm of the spectral norm is of the same order of magnitude as r(f ) log(n/r(f )) where r(f ) = max{r 0 , r 1 }, and r 0 and r 1 are the smallest integers less than n/2 such that f (x) or f (x) · PARITY(x) is constant for all x with x i ∈ [r 0 , n − r 1 ]. We mention some applications to the decision tree and communication complexity of symmetric functions.
Kushilevitz [1989] initiated the study of information-theoretic privacy within the context of communication complexity. Unfortunately, it has been shown that most interesting functions are not privately computable [Kushilevitz 1989, Brandt and Sandholm 2008]. The unattainability of perfect privacy for many functions motivated the study of
approximate privacy
. Feigenbaum et al. [2010a, 2010b] define notions of worst-case as well as average-case approximate privacy and present several interesting upper bounds as well as some open problems for further study. In this article, we obtain asymptotically tight bounds on the trade-offs between both the worst-case and average-case approximate privacy of protocols and their communication cost for Vickrey auctions.
Further, we relate the notion of average-case approximate privacy to other measures based on information cost of protocols. This enables us to prove exponential lower bounds on the subjective approximate privacy of protocols for computing the Intersection function, independent of its communication cost. This proves a conjecture of Feigenbaum et al. [2010a].
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