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arXiv:1610.08349 · Electronic colloquium on computational complexity

Multiplayer parallel repetition for expander games

Irit Dinur, Prahladh Harsha, Rakesh Venkat, Henry Yuen

Published Oct 26, 2016• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate the value of parallel repetition of one-round games with any number of players $k\ge 2$. It has been an open question whether an analogue of Raz's Parallel Repetition Theorem holds for games with more than two players, i.e., whether the value of the repeated game decays exponentially with the number of repetitions. Verbitsky has shown, via a reduction to the density Hales-Jewett theorem, that the value of the repeated game must approach zero, as the number of repetitions increases. However, the rate of decay obtained in this way is extremely slow, and it is an open question whether the true rate is exponential as is the case for all two-player games. Exponential decay bounds are known for several special cases of multi-player games, e.g., free games and anchored games. In this work, we identify a certain expansion property of the base game and show all games with this property satisfy an exponential decay parallel repetition bound. Free games and anchored games satisfy this expansion property, and thus our parallel repetition theorem reproduces all earlier exponential-decay bounds for multiplayer games. More generally, our parallel repetition bound applies to all multiplayer games that are connected in a certain sense. We also describe a very simple game, called the GHZ game, that does not satisfy this connectivity property, and for which we do not know an exponential decay bound. We suspect that progress on bounding the value of this the parallel repetition of the GHZ game will lead to further progress on the general question.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1610.08349

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We investigate the value of parallel repetition of one-round games with any number of players k≥2k\ge 2k≥2. It has been an open question whether an analogue of Raz's Parallel Repetition Theorem holds for games with more than two players, i.e., whether the value of the repeated game decays exponentially with the number of repetitions. Verbitsky has shown, via a reduction to the density Hales-Jewett theorem, that the value of the repeated game must approach zero, as the number of repetitions increases. However, the rate of decay obtained in this way is extremely slow, and it is an open question whether the true rate is exponential as is the case for all two-player games. Exponential decay bounds are known for several special cases of multi-player games, e.g., free games and anchored games. In this work, we identify a certain expansion property of the base game and show all games with this property satisfy an exponential decay parallel repetition bound. Free games and anchored games satisfy this expansion property, and thus our parallel repetition theorem reproduces all earlier exponential-decay bounds for multiplayer games. More generally, our parallel repetition bound applies to all multiplayer games that are connected in a certain sense. We also describe a very simple game, called the GHZ game, that does not satisfy this connectivity property, and for which we do not know an exponential decay bound. We suspect that progress on bounding the value of this the parallel repetition of the GHZ game will lead to further progress on the general question.
We investigate the value of parallel repetition of one-round games with any number of players k>=2. It has been an open question whether an analogue of Raz's Parallel Repetition Theorem holds for games with more than two players, i.e., whether the value of the repeated game decays exponentially with the number of repetitions. Verbitsky has shown, via a reduction to the density Hales-Jewett theorem, that the value of the repeated game must approach zero, as the number of repetitions increases. However, the rate of decay obtained in this way is extremely slow, and it is an open question whether the true rate is exponential as is the case for all two-player games. Exponential decay bounds are known for several special cases of multi-player games, e.g., free games and anchored games. In this work, we identify a certain expansion property of the base game and show all games with this property satisfy an exponential decay parallel repetition bound. Free games and anchored games satisfy this expansion property, and thus our parallel repetition theorem reproduces all earlier exponential-decay bounds for multiplayer games. More generally, our parallel repetition bound applies to all multiplayer games that are *connected* in a certain sense. We also describe a very simple game, called the GHZ game, that does not satisfy this connectivity property, and for which we do not know an exponential decay bound. We suspect that progress on bounding the value of this the parallel repetition of the GHZ game will lead to further progress on the general question.
Two major open problems regarding the parallel repetition of games are whether an analogue of Raz's parallel-repetition theorem holds for (a) games with more than two players, and (b) games with quantum players using entanglement. We make progress on both problems: we introduce a class of games we call anchored, and prove exponential-decay parallel repetition theorems for anchored games in the multiplayer and entangled-player settings. We introduce a simple transformation on games called anchoring and show that this transformation turns any game into an anchored game. Together, our parallel repetition theorem and our anchoring transformation provide a simple and efficient hardness-amplification technique in both the classical multiplayer and quantum settings.
We prove that parallel repetition of the (3-player) GHZ game reduces the value of the game polynomially fast to 0. That is, the value of the GHZ game repeated in parallel ttt times is at most t−Ω(1)t^{-Ω(1)}t−Ω(1). Previously, only a bound of ≈1α(t)\approx \frac{1}{α(t)}≈α(t)1​, where ααα is the inverse Ackermann function, was known. The GHZ game was recently identified by Dinur, Harsha, Venkat and Yuen as a multi-player game where all existing techniques for proving strong bounds on the value of the parallel repetition of the game fail. Indeed, to prove our result we use a completely new proof technique. Dinur, Harsha, Venkat and Yuen speculated that progress on bounding the value of the parallel repetition of the GHZ game may lead to further progress on the general question of parallel repetition of multi-player games. They suggested that the strong correlations present in the GHZ question distribution represent the "hardest instance" of the multi-player parallel repetition problem. Another motivation for studying the parallel repetition of the GHZ game comes from the field of quantum information. The GHZ game, first introduced by Greenberger, Horne and Zeilinger, is a central game in the study of quantum entanglement and has been studied in numerous works. For example, it is used for testing quantum entanglement and for device-independent quantum cryptography. In such applications a game is typically repeated to reduce the probability of error, and hence bounds on the value of the parallel repetition of the game may be useful.
We give a new proof of the fact that the parallel repetition of the (3-player) GHZ game reduces the value of the game to zero polynomially quickly. That is, we show that the value of the nnn-fold GHZ game is at most n−Ω(1)n^{-Ω(1)}n−Ω(1). This was first established by Holmgren and Raz [HR20]. We present a new proof of this theorem that we believe to be simpler and more direct. Unlike most previous works on parallel repetition, our proof makes no use of information theory, and relies on the use of Fourier analysis. The GHZ game [GHZ89] has played a foundational role in the understanding of quantum information theory, due in part to the fact that quantum strategies can win the GHZ game with probability 1. It is possible that improved parallel repetition bounds may find applications in this setting. Recently, Dinur, Harsha, Venkat, and Yuen [DHVY17] highlighted the GHZ game as a simple three-player game, which is in some sense maximally far from the class of multi-player games whose behavior under parallel repetition is well understood. Dinur et al. conjectured that parallel repetition decreases the value of the GHZ game exponentially quickly, and speculated that progress on proving this would shed light on parallel repetition for general multi-player (multi-prover) games.
We consider the natural extension of two-player nonlocal games to an arbitrary number of players. An important question for such nonlocal games is their behavior under parallel repetition. For two-player nonlocal games, it is known that both the classical and the non-signaling value of any game converges to zero exponentially fast under parallel repetition, given that the game is non-trivial to start with (i.e., has classical/non-signaling value <1). Very recent results show similar behavior for the quantum value of a two-player game under parallel repetition. For nonlocal games with three or more players, very little is known up to present on their behavior under parallel repetition; this is true for the classical, the quantum and the non-signaling value. In this work, we show a parallel repetition theorem for the non-signaling value of a large class of multi-player games, for an arbitrary number of players. Our result applies to all multi-player games for which all possible combinations of questions have positive probability; this class in particular includes all free games, in which the questions to the players are chosen independently. Specifically, we prove that if the original game has a non-signaling value smaller than 1, then the non-signaling value of the nnn-fold parallel repetition is exponentially small in nnn. Our parallel repetition theorem for multi-player games is weaker than the known parallel repetition results for two-player games in that the rate at which the non-signaling value of the game decreases not only depends on the non-signaling value of the original game (and the number of possible responses), but on the complete description of the game. Nevertheless, we feel that our result is a first step towards a better understanding of the parallel repetition of nonlocal games with more than two players.