摘要：Randomness extractors, which extract high quality (almost-uniform) random bits from biased random sources, are important objects both in theory and in practice. While there have been significant progress in obtaining near optimal constructions of randomness extractors in various settings, the computational complexity of randomness extractors is still much less studied. In particular, it is not clear whether randomness extractors with good parameters can be computed in several interesting complexity classes that are much weaker than P.
In this paper we study randomness extractors in the following two models of computation: (1) constant-depth circuits (AC^0), and (2) the local computation model. Previous work in these models, such as [Viola, 2005], [Goldreich et al., 2015] and [Bogdanov and Guo, 2013], only achieve constructions with weak parameters. In this work we give explicit constructions of randomness extractors with much better parameters. Our results on AC^0 extractors refute a conjecture in [Goldreich et al., 2015] and answer several open problems there. We also provide a lower bound on the error of extractors in AC^0, which together with the entropy lower bound in [Viola, 2005; Goldreich et al., 2015] almost completely characterizes extractors in this class. Our results on local extractors also significantly improve the seed length in [Bogdanov and Guo, 2013]. As an application, we use our AC^0 extractors to study pseudorandom generators in AC^0, and show that we can construct both cryptographic pseudorandom generators (under reasonable computational assumptions) and unconditional pseudorandom generators for space bounded computation with very good parameters.
Our constructions combine several previous techniques in randomness extractors, as well as introduce new techniques to reduce or preserve the complexity of extractors, which may be of independent interest. These include (1) a general way to reduce the error of strong seeded extractors while preserving the AC^0 property and small locality, and (2) a seeded randomness condenser with small locality.
