Fourier Entropy Bounds via Approximations

Abstract

We establish upper bounds on the Shannon entropy $\mathbb H(\widehat f^{\,2})$ of the Fourier distribution of Boolean functions. We prove that $$ \mathbb H(\widehat f^{\,2}) =O\!\left(\log\bigl(1+\|\widehat f\|_{1,1/3}\bigr)\right), $$ where $\|\widehat f\|_{1,1/3}$ denotes the minimum spectral norm of a pointwise $1/3$-approximant to $f$. This implies $\mathbb H(\widehat f^{\,2})=O(\mathsf R^\oplus(f))$, where $\mathsf R^\oplus(f)$ is bounded-error randomized parity-query complexity. We also bound Fourier entropy by the smaller of the two one-sided average unambiguous parity-certificate complexities. More generally, for any exact representation of indicator of $f$ as $\sum_C w_C\mathbf1_C$, with nonnegative weights and affine subspaces $C$, we prove $$ \mathbb H(\widehat f^{\,2}) =O\!\left(\sum_C w_C\,2^{-k_C}k_C\right), \qquad k_C=\operatorname{codim}(C). $$ The quantity on the right is the average conical junta degree of the representation. These results strengthen earlier bounds of (Arunachalam et al. 2021) by extending approximation-based entropy estimates to Shannon entropy and allowing one-sided and overlapping exact representations. The proofs use an entropy bound from a sequence of increasingly accurate approximants of $f$ with \emph{small} spectral norm. Our techniques also find an application in quantum communication complexity, where it improves a lower bound for the bounded-error quantum communication complexity of XOR functions.