Block Sensitivity can exceed Spectral Sensitivity Squared

Abstract

The spectral sensitivity $\lambda(f)$ of a Boolean function is the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of its sensitivity graph. It lower-bounds every standard measure of query complexity, and Aaronson, Ben-David, Kothari, Rao and Tal, who introduced it, asked whether block sensitivity is at most quadratic in it: is $bs(f)=O(\lambda(f)^{2})$? We show that it is not. We construct a total Boolean function on $2017584$ variables with $bs(f)\ge 14011$ and $\lambda(f)\le 89.0162$, so that $bs(f)\ge\lambda(f)^{2.127}$, and hence by composition a family with $\lambda(f_n)\to\infty$ and $bs(f_n)=\Omega(\lambda(f_n)^{2.127})$. The function is the indicator of a union of $k$ subcubes indexed by the vertices of a doubly regular tournament, and the freedom left in the construction is fixed by the Lov\'asz local lemma. The main result has been formally verified in Lean. We also give numerical evidence that a member of the same family on $1255$ variables reaches an exponent near $2.20$, and exhibit a member on $30$ variables whose exponent already exceeds $2$ and whose spectral sensitivity can be computed exactly.