Cell-Probe Lower Bounds via Semi-Random CSP Refutation: Simplified and the Odd-Locality Case

Abstract

A recent work (Korten, Pitassi, and Impagliazzo, FOCS 2025) established an insightful connection between static data structure lower bounds, range avoidance of $\text{NC}^0$ circuits, and the refutation of pseudorandom CSP instances, leading to improvements to some longstanding lower bounds in the cell-probe/bit-probe models. Here, we improve these lower bounds in certain cases via a more streamlined reduction to XOR refutation, coupled with handling the odd-arity case. Our result can be viewed as a complete derandomization of the state-of-the-art semi-random $k$-XOR refutation analysis (Guruswami, Kothari and Manohar, STOC 2022, Hsieh, Kothari and Mohanty, SODA 2023), which complements the derandomization of the even-arity case obtained by Korten et al. As our main technical statement, we show that for any multi-output constant-depth circuit that substantially stretches its input, its output is very likely far from strings sampled from distributions with sufficient independence, and further this can be efficiently certified. Via suitable shifts in perspectives, this gives applications to cell-probe lower bounds and range avoidance algorithms for $\mathsf{NC}^0$ circuits.