Vahid R. Asadi, Atsuya Hasegawa, François Le Gall (May 12 2026).
Abstract: It is known that there exist multi-prover interactive protocols (
MIP protocols) for the complexity class
NEXP, succinct
MIP protocols for
NP and multi-prover interactive protocols with shared entanglement (
MIP∗ protocols) for
RE. This extraordinary power of multi-prover interactive proof systems comes from the assumption that provers do not communicate with each other during the protocols. If they are allowed to communicate freely, the setting is the same as in the single-prover case, and the computational power of the system becomes significantly weaker. In this paper, we investigate for the first time the setting where communication (i.e., leakage of information) between provers is allowed but bounded. We introduce two techniques to approach this question and show that multi-prover interactive proof systems are robust against some amount of leakage. Our first technique is based on parallel repetition theorems. We apply it to show that for any polynomial
p, we can construct two-prover one-round
MIP and
MIP∗ protocols for
NEXP and
RE, respectively, that are robust against
p(n) bits of leakage. We further derive our second technique to convert any low-soundness PCP construction to a two-prover one-round
MIP protocol for
NP robust against leakage. We also discuss the relation between robustness against leakage in multi-prover interactive proof systems and the Sliding Scale Conjecture in the PCP literature.