Tali Kaufman’s research while affiliated with Bar Ilan University and other places

Coboundary expansion is a high dimensional generalization of the Cheeger constant to simplicial complexes. Originally, this notion was motivated by the fact that it implies topological expansion, but nowadays a significant part of the motivation stems from its deep connection to problems in theoretical computer science such as agreement expansion in the low soundness regime. In this paper, we prove coboundary expansion with non-Abelian coefficients for the coset complex construction of Kaufman and Oppenheim. Our proof uses a novel global argument, as opposed to the local-to-global arguments that are used to prove cosystolic expansion.

In this work we present a new local to global criterion for proving a form of high dimensional expansion, which we term cosystolic expansion. Applying this criterion on Ramanujan complexes yields for every dimension an infinite family of bounded degree complexes with the topological overlap property. This answers an open question raised by Gromov.

"No Where to go but in" is a well known statement of Osho. Osho meant to say that the answers to all our questions should be obtained by looking into ourselves. In a paraphrase to Osho's statement we say "No Where to go but high". This meant to demonstrate that for various seemingly unrelated topics and questions the only way to get significant progress is via the prism of a new philosophy (new field) called high dimensional expansion. In this note we give an introduction \footnote{This introduction reflects the authors' interests and by no mean claim to represent the field in a through way} to the high dimensional expansion philosophy, and how it has been useful recently in obtaining progress in various questions in seemingly unrelated fields. This exposition is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Sarah Kaufman, who was always trying to understand the reason why things behave in a certain way. It is also dedicated to the memory of my father Eliezer Kaufman.

In recent years, high dimensional expanders have been found to have a variety of applications in theoretical computer science, such as efficient CSPs approximations, improved sampling and list-decoding algorithms, and more. Within that, an important high dimensional expansion notion is \emph{cosystolic expansion}, which has found applications in the construction of efficiently decodable quantum codes and in proving lower bounds for CSPs. Cosystolic expansion is considered with systems of equations over a group where the variables and equations correspond to faces of the complex. Previous works that studied cosystolic expansion were tailored to the specific group $\mathbb{F}_2$. In particular, Kaufman, Kazhdan and Lubotzky (FOCS 2014), and Evra and Kaufman (STOC 2016) in their breakthrough works, who solved a famous open question of Gromov, have studied a notion which we term ``parity'' expansion for small sets. They showed that small sets of k-faces have proportionally many (k+1)-faces that contain \emph{an odd number} of k-faces from the set. Parity expansion for small sets could be used to imply cosystolic expansion only over $\mathbb{F}_2$. In this work we introduce a stronger \emph{unique-neighbor-like} expansion for small sets. We show that small sets of k-faces have proportionally many (k+1)-faces that contain \emph{exactly one} k-face from the set. This notion is fundamentally stronger than parity expansion and cannot be implied by previous works. We then show, utilizing the new unique-neighbor-like expansion notion introduced in this work, that cosystolic expansion can be made \emph{group-independent}, i.e., unique-neighbor-like expansion for small sets implies cosystolic expansion \emph{over any group}.

Recent works have shown that expansion of pseudorandom sets is of great importance. However, all current works on pseudorandom sets are limited only to product (or approximate product) spaces, where Fourier Analysis methods could be applied. In this work we ask the natural question whether pseudorandom sets are relevant in domains where Fourier Analysis methods cannot be applied, e.g., one-sided local spectral expanders. We take the first step in the path of answering this question. We put forward a new definition for pseudorandom sets, which we call ``double balanced sets''. We demonstrate the strength of our new definition by showing that small double balanced sets in one-sided local spectral expanders have very strong expansion properties, such as unique-neighbor-like expansion. We further show that cohomologies in cosystolic expanders are double balanced, and use the newly derived strong expansion properties of double balanced sets in order to obtain an exponential improvement over the current state of the art lower bound on their minimal distance.

One of the key components in PCP constructions are agreement tests. In agreement test the tester is given access to subsets of fixed size of some set, each equipped with an assignment. The tester is then tasked with testing whether these local assignments agree with some global assignment over the entire set. One natural generalization of this concept is the case where, instead of a single assignment to each local view, the tester is given access to l different assignments for every subset. The tester is then tasked with testing whether there exist l global functions that agree with all of the assignments of all of the local views. In this work we present sufficient condition for a set system to exhibit this generalized definition of list agreement expansion. This is, to our knowledge, the first work to consider this natural generalization of agreement testing. Despite initially appearing very similar to agreement expansion, list agreement expansion seem to require a different set of techniques. This is due to the fact that the natural extension of agreement testing does not suffice when testing for list agreement, as list agreement crucially relies on a global structure. It follows that if a local assignments satisfy list agreement they must not only agree locally but also exhibit some additional structure. In order to test for the existence of this additional structure we use a connection between covering spaces of a high dimensional complex and its coboundaries. We use this connection as a form of ``decoupling''. Moreover, we show that any set system that exhibits list agreement expansion also supports direct sum testing. This is the first scheme for direct sum testing that works regardless of the parity of the sizes of the local sets. Prior to our work the schemes for direct sum testing were based on the parity of the sizes of the local tests.

One of the most important properties of high dimensional expanders is that high dimensional random walks converge rapidly. This property has proven to be extremely useful in variety of fields in the theory of computer science from agreement testing to sampling, coding theory and more. In this paper we improve upon the result of Kaufman-Oppenheim and Alev-Lau regarding the convergence of random walks by presenting a structured version of their result. While previous works examined the expansion in the viewpoint of the worst possible eigenvalue, in this work we relate the expansion of a function to the entire spectrum of the random walk operator using the structure of the function. In some cases this finer result can be much better than the worst case. In order to prove our structured version of the convergence of random walks, we present a general framework that allows us to relate the convergence of random walks to the trickling down theorem for the first time. Concretely, we show that both the state of the art results for convergence of random walks and the tricking down theorem can be derived using the same argument that we present here. This new, unified, way of looking at the convergence of high dimensional random walks and the trickling down theorem gives us a new understanding of pseudorandom functions that allows us to consider pseudorandom functions in one-sided local spectral expanders for the first time.