A structure theorem for poorly anticoncentrated polynomials of Gaussians and applications to the study of polynomial threshold functions

Abstract

We prove a structural result for degree-dd polynomials. In particular, we show that any degree-dd polynomial, pp can be approximated by another polynomial, p0p0, which can be decomposed as some function of polynomials q1,…,qmq1,…,qm with qiqi normalized and m=Od(1)m=Od(1), so that if XX is a Gaussian random variable, the probability distribution on (q1(X),…,qm(X))(q1(X),…,qm(X)) does not have too much mass in any small box. Using this result, we prove improved versions of a number of results about polynomial threshold functions, including producing better pseudorandom generators, obtaining a better invariance principle, and proving improved bounds on noise sensitivity.