Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar II

We present an iterative approach to constructing pseudorandom generators, based on the repeated application of mild pseudorandom restrictions. We use this template to construct pseudorandom generators for combinatorial rectangles and read-once CNFs and a hitting set generator for width-3 branching programs that achieve near-optimal seed-length even in the low error regime. The (pseudo)random restrictions we use are milder than those typically used for proving circuit lower bounds, in that we only set a constant fraction of the bits at a time. While such restrictions do not simplify the functions drastically, we show that they can be derandomized using small-bias spaces. Based on joint work with Raghu Meka, Omer Reingold, Luca Trevisan and Salil Vadhan.