Sourav Chakraborty ; Chandrima Kayal ; Manaswi Paraashar - Separations between Combinatorial Measures for Transitive Functions

dmtcs:11133 - Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science, September 20, 2025, vol. 27:2 - https://doi.org/10.46298/dmtcs.11133
Separations between Combinatorial Measures for Transitive FunctionsArticle

Authors: Sourav Chakraborty ; Chandrima Kayal ; Manaswi Paraashar

The role of symmetry in Boolean functions $f:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ has been extensively studied in complexity theory. For example, symmetric functions, that is, functions that are invariant under the action of $S_n$, is an important class of functions in the study of Boolean functions. A function $f:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ is called transitive (or weakly-symmetric) if there exists a transitive group $G$ of $S_n$ such that $f$ is invariant under the action of $G$ - that is the function value remains unchanged even after the bits of the input of $f$ are moved around according to some permutation $σ\in G$. Understanding various complexity measures of transitive functions has been a rich area of research for the past few decades.
In this work, we study transitive functions in light of several combinatorial measures. We look at the maximum separation between various pairs of measures for transitive functions. Such study for general Boolean functions has been going on for past many years. The best-known results for general Boolean functions have been nicely compiled by Aaronson et. al (STOC, 2021).
The separation between a pair of combinatorial measures is shown by constructing interesting functions that demonstrate the separation. But many of the celebrated separation results are via the construction of functions (like "pointer functions" from Ambainis et al. (JACM, 2017) and "cheat-sheet functions" Aaronson et al. (STOC, 2016)) that are not transitive. Hence, we don't have such separation between the pairs of measures for transitive functions.
In this paper we show how to modify some of these functions to construct transitive functions that demonstrate similar separations between pairs of combinatorial measures.


Volume: vol. 27:2
Section: Discrete Algorithms
Published on: September 20, 2025
Accepted on: June 7, 2025
Submitted on: March 30, 2023
Keywords: Computational Complexity

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