Modular composition via complex roots

Joris van der Hoevena, Grégoire Lecerfb

Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique, CNRS UMR 7161

École polytechnique

91128 Palaiseau Cedex, France

a. Email: vdhoeven@lix.polytechnique.fr

b. Email: lecerf@lix.polytechnique.fr

Preprint version, November 4, 2023

Modular composition is the problem to compute the composition of two univariate polynomials modulo a third one. For polynomials with coefficients in a finite field, Kedlaya and Umans proved in 2008 that the theoretical complexity for performing this task could be made arbitrarily close to linear. Unfortunately, beyond its major theoretical impact, this result has not led to practically faster implementations yet. In this paper, we explore the particular case when the ground field is the field of computable complex numbers. Ultimately, when the precision becomes sufficiently large, we show that modular compositions may be performed in softly linear time.

1.Introduction

Let be an effective field, and let be polynomials in . The problem of modular composition is to compute modulo . Modular composition is an important problem in complexity theory because of its applications to polynomial factorization [14-16]. It also occurs very naturally whenever one wishes to perform polynomial computations over inside an algebraic extension of . In addition, given two different representations of an algebraic extension of , the implementation of an explicit isomorphism actually boils down to modular composition.

Denote by the number of operations in required to multiply two polynomials of degree in . Let and be polynomials in of respective degrees , and . The naive modular composition algorithm takes operations in . In 1978, Brent and Kung [3] gave an algorithm with cost . It uses the baby-step giant-step technique due to Paterson and Stockmeyer [21], and even yields a sub-quadratic cost when using fast linear algebra (see [13, p. 185]). The constant is such that a matrix over can be multiplied with another rectangular matrix in time . The best current bound is due to Huang and Pan [12, Theorem 10.1].

A major breakthrough has been achieved by Kedlaya and Umans [15, 16] in the case when is the finite field . For any positive , they showed that the composition modulo could be computed with bit complexity . Unfortunately, it remains a major open problem to turn this theoretical complexity bound into practically useful implementations.

Quite surprisingly, the existing literature on modular composition does not exploit the simple observation that composition modulo a separable polynomial that splits over can be reduced to the well known problems of multi-point evaluation and interpolation [6, Chapter 10]. More precisely, assume that is separable, which means that . If are of degree , then can be computed by evaluating at , by evaluating at , and by interpolating the evaluations to yield .

Whenever is algebraically closed and a factorization of is known, the latter observation leads to a softly-optimal algorithm for composition modulo . More generally, if the computation of a factorization of has a negligible or acceptable cost, then this approach leads to an efficient method for modular composition. In this paper, we prove a precise complexity result in the case when is the field of computable complex numbers. In a separate paper [11], we also consider the case when is a finite field and has composite degree; in that case, can be factored over suitable field extensions, and similar ideas lead to improved complexity bounds.

In the special case of power series composition (i.e. composition modulo ), our approach is similar in spirit to the analytic algorithm designed by Ritzmann [22]; see also [8]. In order to keep the exposition as simple as possible in this paper, we only study composition modulo separable polynomials. By handling multiplicities with Ritzmann's algorithm, we expect our algorithm to extend to the general case.

The organization of the present paper is as follows. In section 2, we specify the complexity model to be used, and various standard notations. In section 3, we give a detailed version of the modular composition algorithm that we sketched above for a separable modulus that splits over . In order to instantiate this algorithm for the field of computable complex numbers, we need additional concepts. In section 4, we recall basic results about ball arithmetic [9]. In section 5, we recall the computation model of straight-line programs [4]. In section 6, we introduce a new ultimate complexity model that is convenient for proving complexity results at a “sufficiently large precision”. This model has the advantage that complexity results over an abstract effective field can naturally be turned into ultimate complexity results over . In section 7, we apply this transfer principle to the modular composition algorithm from section 3—we expect our framework to be useful in many other situations.

One disadvantage of ultimate complexity analysis is that it does not provide us with any information about the precision from which the ultimate complexity is reached. In practical applications, the input polynomials and often admit integer or rational coefficients. In these cases, the required bit precision is expected to be of order in the worst case, where and is the largest bit size of the coefficients: in fact, this precision allows to compute all the complex roots of efficiently using algorithms from [18, 19, 24]. This precision should also be sufficient to perform the multi-point polynomial evaluations of and by asymptotically fast algorithms. We intend to work out more such detailed bit complexity bounds for this situation in a forthcoming paper.

2.Preliminaries

In the sequel, we consider both the algebraic and bit complexity models for analyzing the costs of our algorithms. The algebraic complexity model expresses the running time in terms of the number of operations in some abstract ground ring or field [4, Chapter 4]. The bit complexity model relies on Turing machines with a sufficient number of tapes [20].

Fundamental algebraic complexity bounds
Let be an effective field. We write for a function that bounds the total cost of a polynomial product algorithm in terms of the number operations in . In other words, two polynomials of degrees in can be multiplied using at most arithmetic operations in . The schoolbook algorithm allows us to take . The fastest currently known algorithm [5] yields . Here, the soft-Oh notation means that (we refer the reader to [6, Chapter 25, Section 7] for technical details). In order to simplify the cost analysis of our algorithms we make the customary assumption that for all . Notice that this assumption implies the super-additivity of , namely for all and .

Fundamental bit complexity bounds
For bit complexity analyses, we consider Turing machines with sufficiently many tapes. We write for a function that bounds the bit-cost of an algorithm which multiplies two integers of bit sizes at most , for the usual binary representation. The best known bound [7] for is . Again, we make the customary assumption that is nondecreasing.

Multipoint evaluation and interpolation
Let again be an effective field. The remainder (resp. quotient) of the Euclidean division of by in is denoted by (resp. by ). It may be computed using operations in , if and have degrees . We recall that the gcd of two polynomials of degrees at most over can be computed using operations in [6, Algorithm 11.4]. Given polynomials and over with and , all the remainders may be computed simultaneously in cost using a subproduct tree [6, Chapter 10]. The inverse problem, called Chinese remaindering, can be solved with a similar cost , assuming that the are pairwise coprime. The fastest known algorithms for these tasks can be found in [1, 2, 10].

3.Abstract modular composition in the separable case

For any field and , we denote

In this section, represents an abstract algebraically closed field of constants. Let be a separable monic polynomial, so admits pairwise distinct roots in . Then we may use the following algorithm for composition modulo :

Algorithm 1

Input
Polynomials and pairwise distinct .

Output

, where .

  1. Compute using fast multi-point evaluation.

  2. Compute using fast multi-point evaluation.

  3. Retrieve with using fast interpolation.

  4. Return .

Theorem 1. Algorithm 1 is correct and requires operations in .

Proof. By construction, for . Since and the are pairwise distinct, it follows that . This proves the correctness of the algorithm. The complexity bound follows from the fact that steps 1, 2 and 3 take operations in .

We wish to apply the theorem in the case when . Of course, on a Turing machine, we can only approximate complex numbers with arbitrarily high precision, and likewise for the field operations in . For given numbers and , approximations at precision for , , and (whenever ) can all be computed in time . In view of Theorem 1, it is therefore natural to ask whether -bit approximations of the coefficients of may be computed in time .

In the remainder of this paper we give a positive answer to a carefully formulated version of this question. Our first task is to make the concept of “approximations at precision more precise and to understand the way errors accumulate when performing a sequence of computations at precision . We rely on “fixed point ball arithmetic” for this matter, as described in the next subsection. At a second stage, we prove a complexity bound for modular composition that holds for a fixed modulus with known roots and for sufficiently large working precisions .

The assumption that the roots of are known is actually quite harmless in this context for the following reason: as soon as approximations for are known at a sufficiently high precision, the computation of even better approximations can be done fast using Newton's method combined with multi-point evaluation. Since we are only interested in the complexity for “sufficiently large working precisions”, the computation of the initial approximations of can therefore be regarded as a precomputation of negligible cost.

4.Ball arithmetic and straight-line programs

4.1.Fixed point numbers

Let be a real number, we write for the largest integer less or equal to and for the closest integer to .

Given a precision , we denote by the set of fixed point numbers with binary digits after the dot. This set is clearly stable under addition and subtraction. We can also define approximate multiplication on using , so for all .

For any fixed constant and , we notice that and can be computed in time , whereas can be computed in time . Similarly, one may define an approximate inversion on by . For any fixed constant and , we may compute in time .

4.2.Fixed point ball arithmetic

Ball arithmetic is used for providing reliable error bounds for approximate computations. A ball is a set with and . From the computational point of view, we represent such balls by their centers and radii . We denote by the set of balls with centers in and radii in . Given vectors and we write to mean , and we also set .

Let be an open subset of . We say that is a domain lift at precision if for all . The maximal such lift is given by . Given a function , a ball lift of at precision is a function , where is a domain lift of at precision , that satisfies the inclusion property: for any and , we have

A ball lift of is a computable sequence of ball lifts at every precision such that for any sequence with , we have

This condition implies the following:

We say that is maximal if is the maximal domain lift for each . Notice that a function must be continuous in order to admit a maximal ball lift.

The following formulas define maximal ball lifts , and at precision for the ring operations , and :

The extra in the formula for multiplication is needed in order to counter the effect of rounding errors that might occur in the three multiplications , and . For with , the following formula also defines a maximal ball lift at precision for the inversion:

For any fixed constant and , we notice that , , and can be computed in time .

Let be the ball lift of a function with . Consider a second ball lift of a function with . Then we may define a ball lift of the composition as follows. For each precision , we take , where is the restriction of to the set .

We shall use ball arithmetic for the computation of complex functions simply through the consideration of real and imaginary parts. This point of view is sufficient for the asymptotic complexity point of view of the present paper. Of course, it would be more efficient to directly compute with complex balls (i.e. balls with a complex center and a real radius), but this would involve approximate square roots and ensuing technicalities.

4.3.The Lipschitz property

Assume that we are given the ball lift of a function with . Given a subset and constants , we say that the ball lift is -Lipschitz on if

For instance, the ball lifts and of addition and subtraction are -Lipschitz on . Similarly, the ball lift of multiplication is -Lipschitz on (by taking ), whereas the ball lift of is -Lipschitz on .

Given and as above, we say that is locally -Lipschitz on if is -Lipschitz on each compact subset of . We define to be -Lipschitz (resp. locally -Lipschitz) on if there exists a constant for which is -Lipschitz (resp. locally -Lipschitz). If is locally -Lipschitz on , then it is not hard to see that is necessarily locally Lipschitz on , with Lipschitz constant . That is,

In fact, the requirement that a computable ball lift is -Lipschitz implies that we have a means to compute high quality error bounds. We finally define to be Lipschitz (resp. locally Lipschitz) on if there exists a constant for which is -Lipschitz (resp. locally -Lipschitz).

Lemma 2. Let be a locally -Lipschitz ball lift of on an open set . Let be a locally -Lipschitz ball lift of on an open set . If and , then is a locally -Lipschitz ball lift of on .

Proof. Consider a compact subset . Since this implies to be a compact subset of , it follows that there exists an such that . Let , and be such that for any , and , we have

Given with and , it follows that satisfies , whence . If we also assume that , then it also follows that , whence and . In other words, if and , then and .

5.Straight-line programs

A signature is a finite or countable set of function symbols together with an arity for each . A model for is a set together with a function with for each . If is a topological space, then is required to be an open subset of . Let be a countable and ordered set of variable symbols.

A straight-line program with signature is a sequence of instructions of the form

where and , together with a subset of output variables. Variables that appear for the first time in the sequence in the right-hand side of an instruction are called input variables. We denote by the set of input variables. The number is called the length of .

There exist unique sequences and with and . Given a model of we can run for inputs in , provided that the arguments are always in the domain of when executing the instruction . Let be the set of tuples on which can be run. Given , let denote the value of at the end of the program. Hence gives rise to a function .

Now assume that is a model for and that we are given a ball lift of for each . Then is also a model for at each precision , by taking for each . Consequently, any SLP as above gives rise to both a function and a ball lift at each precision . The sequence thus provides us with a ball lift for .

Proposition 3. If the ball lift of is Lipschitz for each , then is again Lipschitz.

Proof. For each model of , for each variable and each input , let denote the value of after step . We may regard as a function from to . In particular, we obtain a computable sequence of functions that give rise to a ball lift of . Let us show by induction over that is Lipschitz for every . This is clear for , so let . If , then we have ; otherwise, we have

In both cases, it follows from Lemma 2 that is again a Lipschitz ball lift. We conclude by noticing that .

6.Computable numbers and ultimate complexity

A real number is said to be computable if there exists an approximation algorithm that takes on input and produces on output with (we say that is a -approximation of ). We denote by the field of computable real numbers.

Let be a nondecreasing function. We say that a computable real number has ultimate complexity if it admits an approximation algorithm that computes in time for some fixed constant . The fact that we allow to be computed in time and not is justified by the observation that the position of the “binary dot” is somewhat arbitrary in the approximation process of a computable number.

The notion of approximation algorithm generalizes to vectors with real coefficients: given , an approximation algorithm for as a whole is an algorithm that takes on input and returns on output with for . This definition naturally extends to any other mathematical objects that can be encoded by vectors of real numbers: complex numbers (by their real and complex parts), polynomials and matrices (by their vectors of coefficients), etc. The notion of ultimate complexity also extends to any of these objects.

A ball lift is said to be computable if there exists an algorithm for computing for all . A computable ball lift of a function with allows us to compute the restriction of to : given with approximation algorithm , by taking , we have , , and .

Let be a nondecreasing function and assume that is open. We say that has ultimate complexity if for every compact set , there exist constants , and such that for any and with and , we can compute in time . For instance, and have ultimate complexity , whereas and have ultimate complexity .

Proposition 4. Assume that is locally Lipschitz. If has ultimate complexity and has ultimate complexity , then has ultimate complexity .

Proof. Let be an approximation algorithm for of complexity , where . There exist and a compact ball around with and such that is included in for all . There also exists a constant such that can be computed in time for all . Since is locally Lipschitz, there exists yet another constant such that for . For and , this shows that we may compute a -approximation of in time .

Proposition 5. Assume that and g are two locally Lipschitz ball lifts of and that can be composed. If and g have respective ultimate complexities and , then has ultimate complexity .

Proof. In a similar way as in the proof of Lemma 2, the evaluation of for with and boils down to the evaluation of at and the evaluation of at with . Modulo a further lowering of and if necessary, these evaluations can be done in time and for suitable and sufficiently large .

Theorem 6. Assume that is a model for the function symbols , and that we are given a computable ball lift of for each . For each , assume in addition that is locally Lipschitz, and let be a nondecreasing function such that has ultimate complexity . Let be an SLP over whose -th instruction writes . Then, the ball lift of has ultimate complexity

Proof. This is a direct consequence of Proposition 5.

Corollary 7. Let be an SLP of length over (where and are naturally seen as constant fonctions of arity zero). Then, there exists a ball lift of with ultimate complexity .

Proof. We use the ball lifts of section 4 for each : they are locally Lipschitz and computable with ultimate complexity . We may thus apply the Theorem 6 to obtain .

7.Ultimate modular composition for separable moduli

Lemma 8. There exists a constant such that the following assertion holds. Let , let be pairwise distinct elements of , and let . Assume that has ultimate complexity . Then has ultimate complexity .

Proof. The algorithm for fast multi-point evaluation of a polynomial at can be regarded as an SLP over of length that takes on input and that produces on output. Similarly, the algorithm for interpolation can be regarded as an SLP over of length that takes on input and that produces on output with . Altogether, we may regard the entire Algorithm 1 as an SLP over of length that takes on input and that produces on output with . It follows from Corollary 7 that admits a ball lift of ultimate complexity . The conclusion now follows from Proposition 4.

According to the above lemma, we notice that the time complexity for computing is for some constant that depends on , , and the .

Lemma 9. There exists a constant such that the following assertion holds. Let be separable and monic of degree , and denote the roots of by . If has ultimate complexity , then has ultimate complexity .

Proof. There are many algorithms for the certified computation of the roots of a separable complex polynomial. We may use any of these algorithms as a “fall back” algorithm in the case that we only need a -approximation of at a low precision determined by only.

For general precisions , we use the following strategy in order to compute a ball with and for some fixed threshold . For some suitable and , we use the fall back algorithm. For and for a second fixed constant , we first compute a ball enclosure at the lower precision using a recursive application of the method. We next compute using a ball version of the Newton iteration, as explained below. If this yields a ball with acceptable radius , then we are done. Otherwise, we resort to our fall-back method. Such calls of the fall-back method only occur if the default threshold precision was chosen too low. Nevertheless, we will show that there exists a threshold such that the computed by the Newton iteration always satisfies for .

Let us detail how we perform our ball version of the Newton iteration. Recall that with and is given. We also assume that we computed once and for all a -approximation of , in the form of a ball polynomial of radius that contains . Now we evaluate and at each of the points using fast multi-point evaluation. Let us denote the results by and . Let , and denote the balls with radius zero and whose centers are the same as for , and . Using vector notation, the Newton iteration now becomes:

If , then it is well-known [17, 23] that . Since , the fact that multi-point ball evaluation (used for and ) is locally Lipschitz implies the existence of a constant with and . Since for , there also exists a constant with . Altogether, this means that there exists a constant with . Let . Then for any , the Newton iteration provides us with a with .

Let us now analyze the ultimate complexity of our algorithm. For large , the algorithm essentially performs two multi-point evaluations of ultimate cost for some constant that does not depend on , and a recursive call. Consequently,

We finally obtain an other constant such that

by summing up the geometric progression and using the fact that is nondecreasing. The conclusion now follows from Lemma 4.

Remark 10. A remarkable feature of the above proof is that the precision at which the Newton iteration can safely be used does not need to be known in advance. In particular, the proof does not require any a priori knowledge about the Lipschitz constants.

Theorem 11. There exists a constant such that the following assertion holds. Let and let be separable and monic of degree . Assume that has ultimate complexity . Then has ultimate complexity .

Proof. This is an immediate consequence of the combination of the two above lemmas.

8.Conclusion and final remarks

With some more work, we expect that all above bounds of the form can be lowered to . Notice that for , when taking [7]. In order to prove this stronger bound using our framework, one might add an auxiliary operation for the product of two polynomials of degrees to the set of signatures . Polynomial products of this kind can be implemented for coefficients in with using Kronecker substitution. For bounded coefficients, this technique allows for the computation of one such product in time . By using Theorem 6, a standard complexity analysis should show that multi-point evaluation and interpolation have ultimate complexity .

By Theorem 11, the actual bit complexity of modular composition is of the form for some value of that depends on (hence of ). An interesting problem is to get a better grip on this value , which mainly depends on the geometric proximity of the roots of .

If belong to , then and we may wish to bound as a function of and the maximum bit size of the coefficients of , and . This would involve bit complexity results for root isolation [18, 19, 24], for multi-point evaluation, and for interpolation. The overal complexity should then be compared with the maximal size of the output, namely , which is in general much larger than the input size.

If is not separable, but if a separable decomposition is known, then the techniques developed in this paper could be combined with Ritzmann's algorithm for the composition of formal power series [22]. If such a separable decomposition is not known, then it is an interesting problem to obtain a general algorithm for modular composition with a similar complexity (but this seems far beyond the scope of this paper).

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