One-way communication complexity and non-adaptive decision trees

Abstract

We study the relationship between various one-way communication complexity measures of a composed function with the analogous decision tree complexity of the outer function. We consider two gadgets: the AND function on 2 inputs, and the Inner Product on a constant number of inputs. Let $IP$ denote Inner Product on $2b$ bits. - If $f$ is a total Boolean function that depends on all of its inputs, the bounded-error one-way quantum communication complexity of $f \circ IP$ equals $\Omega(n(b-1))$. - If $f$ is a partial Boolean function, the deterministic one-way communication complexity of $f \circ IP$ is at least $\Omega(b \cdot D_{dt}^{\rightarrow}(f))$, where $D_{dt}^{\rightarrow}(f)$ denotes the non-adaptive decision tree complexity of $f$. Montanaro and Osborne [arXiv'09] observed that the deterministic one-way communication complexity of $f \circ XOR_2$ equals the non-adaptive parity decision tree complexity of $f$. In contrast, we show the following with the gadget $AND_2$. - There exists a function for which even the quantum non-adaptive AND decision tree complexity of $f$ is exponentially large in the deterministic one-way communication complexity of $f \circ AND_2$. - For symmetric functions $f$, the non-adaptive AND decision tree complexity of $f$ is at most quadratic in the (even two-way) communication complexity of $f \circ AND_2$. In view of the first point, a lower bound on non-adaptive AND decision tree complexity of $f$ does not lift to a lower bound on one-way communication complexity of $f \circ AND_2$. In our final result we show that for all $f$, the deterministic one-way communication complexity of $F = f \circ AND_2$ is at most $(rank(M_{F}))(1 - \Omega(1))$, where $M_{F}$ denotes the communication matrix of $F$. This shows that the rank upper bound on one-way communication complexity (which can be tight in general) is not tight for AND-composed functions.