Bounded Relativization

Relativization is one of the most fundamental concepts in complexity theory, which explains the difficulty of resolving major open problems. In this paper, we propose a weaker notion of relativization called bounded relativization. For a complexity class ?, we say that a statement is ?-relativizing if the statement holds relative to every oracle ? ? ?. It is easy to see that every result that relativizes also ?-relativizes for every complexity class ?. On the other hand, we observe that many non-relativizing results, such as IP = PSPACE, are in fact PSPACE-relativizing. First, we use the idea of bounded relativization to obtain new lower bound results, including the following nearly maximum circuit lower bound: for every constant ? > 0, BPE^{MCSP}/2^{?n} ? SIZE[2?/n]. We prove this by PSPACE-relativizing the recent pseudodeterministic pseudorandom generator by Lu, Oliveira, and Santhanam (STOC 2021). Next, we study the limitations of PSPACE-relativizing proof techniques, and show that a seemingly minor improvement over the known results using PSPACE-relativizing techniques would imply a breakthrough separation NP ? L. For example: - Impagliazzo and Wigderson (JCSS 2001) proved that if EXP ? BPP, then BPP admits infinitely-often subexponential-time heuristic derandomization. We show that their result is PSPACE-relativizing, and that improving it to worst-case derandomization using PSPACE-relativizing techniques implies NP ? L. - Oliveira and Santhanam (STOC 2017) recently proved that every dense subset in P admits an infinitely-often subexponential-time pseudodeterministic construction, which we observe is PSPACE-relativizing. Improving this to almost-everywhere (pseudodeterministic) or (infinitely-often) deterministic constructions by PSPACE-relativizing techniques implies NP ? L. - Santhanam (SICOMP 2009) proved that pr-MA does not have fixed polynomial-size circuits. This lower bound can be shown PSPACE-relativizing, and we show that improving it to an almost-everywhere lower bound using PSPACE-relativizing techniques implies NP ? L. In fact, we show that if we can use PSPACE-relativizing techniques to obtain the above-mentioned improvements, then PSPACE ? EXPH. We obtain our barrier results by constructing suitable oracles computable in EXPH relative to which these improvements are impossible