Interactive compression for product distributions

Abstract

We study the interactive compression problem: Given a two-party communication protocol with small information cost, can it be compressed so that the total number of bits communicated is also small? We consider the case where the parties have inputs that are independent of each other, and give a simulation protocol that communicates I^2 * polylog(I) bits, where I is the information cost of the original protocol. Our protocol is the first simulation protocol whose communication complexity is bounded by a polynomial in the information cost of the original protocol.