As we already covered in earlier posts, quite a few notable property testing papers were presented at the SODA and ITCS conferences this month. In addition, an exciting new set of results on a variant of the linearity testing problem was also posted on ECCC.

Direct Sum Testing by Roee David, Irit Dinur, Elazar Goldenberg, Guy Kindler, and Igor Shinkar. One of the true gems of property testing is the linearity testing: as Blum, Luby, and Rubinfeld first showed, we can test whether a boolean function is linear with a (very natural) 3-query test. A fascinating variant of this problem that is still largely open to this day is the following: is linearity still testable even when we consider functions defined on a subset of the hypercube? This paper considers the problem when the subsets in question are layers of the hypercube, a problem that is closely connected to PCP constructions and direct sum operations on multi-player games. The main result of the paper shows that we can also test linearity for functions defined on layers of the hypercube with a natural 3-query tester.