A somewhat “sublinear” month of April, as far as property testing is concerned, with only one paper. (We may have missed some; if so, please let us know in the comments!)

Graph Streaming Lower Bounds for Parameter Estimation and Property Testing via a Streaming XOR Lemma, by Sepehr Assadi and Vishvajeet N (arXiv). This paper establishes space vs. pass trade-offs lower bounds for streaming algorithms, for a variety of graph tasks: that is, of the sort “any \(m\)-pass-streaming algorithm for task \(\mathcal{T}\) must use memory at least \(f(m)\).” The tasks considered include graph property estimation (size of the maximum matching, of the max cut, of the weight of the MST) and property testing for sparse graphs (connectivity, bipartiteness, and cycle-freeness). The authors obtained exponentially improved lower bounds for those, via reductions to a relatively standard problem, (noisy) gap cycle counting, for which they establish their main lower bound. As a key component of their proof, they prove a general direct product result (XOR lemma) for the streaming setting, showing that the advantage for solving the XOR of \(\ell\) copies of a streaming predicate \(f\) decreases exponentially with \(\ell\).