Fourier Growth of Structured 𝔽-Polynomials and Applications

Jaroslaw Blasiok, Peter Ivanov, Yaonan Jin, Chin Ho Lee, Rocco A. Servedio, Emanuele Viola

Abstract: We analyze the Fourier growth, i.e. the L₁ Fourier weight at level k (denoted L_{1,k}), of various well-studied classes of "structured" m F₂-polynomials. This study is motivated by applications in pseudorandomness, in particular recent results and conjectures due to [Chattopadhyay et al., 2019; Chattopadhyay et al., 2019; Eshan Chattopadhyay et al., 2020] which show that upper bounds on Fourier growth (even at level k = 2) give unconditional pseudorandom generators. Our main structural results on Fourier growth are as follows: - We show that any symmetric degree-d m F₂-polynomial p has L_{1,k}(p) ≤ Pr [p = 1] ⋅ O(d)^k. This quadratically strengthens an earlier bound that was implicit in [Omer Reingold et al., 2013]. - We show that any read-Δ degree-d m F₂-polynomial p has L_{1,k}(p) ≤ Pr [p = 1] ⋅ (k Δ d)^{O(k)}. - We establish a composition theorem which gives L_{1,k} bounds on disjoint compositions of functions that are closed under restrictions and admit L_{1,k} bounds. Finally, we apply the above structural results to obtain new unconditional pseudorandom generators and new correlation bounds for various classes of m F₂-polynomials.