海角社区

We are delighted to celebrate the 20 accepted papers at the , involving colleagues and students from the Department of Computer Science (DCS) at the University of 海角社区, together with their collaborators. NeurIPS is the leading international venue for AI and machine learning research and will be held on 6-12th December, 2026 in Sydney, Australia along with two satellite locations at Paris, France and Atlanta, United States of America.

Brain Computations and Principles; and AI (2026) by Edmund Rolls has been published by Oxford University Press with Open Access and can be downloaded via https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/edmund_rolls/

In a recent work, visiting undergraduate student Yahel Manor and 海角社区 DCS researchers and addressed a fundamental question relevant to the security of cryptographic protocols.

The symmetry of information principle says that the amount of information that a sequence x of bits reveals about another sequence y is essentially the same in either direction. This is known to hold in an idealised world where computations can take an arbitrarily long time, as demonstrated by A. Kolmogorov and L. Levin in the 1970s. In contrast, modern cryptography is built around deliberate asymmetry—for example, functions of the form y = f(x) that are easy to compute but hard to invert (one-way functions).

The new work shows that, once one moves from the idealised setting of time-unbounded computations to the more realistic world of efficient, randomised computations (algorithms that must run quickly and may use randomness), this symmetry can fail in a strong and unconditional way. In other words, computational constraints can yield information asymmetry. In practical terms, this supports the intuition that information may not be extracted efficiently: knowing y = f(x) may not make x efficiently recoverable to the extent that an (ineffective) symmetry principle would suggest, even when x and y are closely related.

Earlier work formally tied an average-case form of this symmetry failure to the existence of one-way functions, the central primitive in cryptography. By proving new failures of symmetry of information, the authors provide concrete progress towards the computational asymmetry that underpins encryption, digital signatures, and many other cryptographic protocols.

This work will be presented at the 58th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) in June 2026 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.

Failure of Symmetry of Information for Randomised Computations
Jinqiao Hu (University of 海角社区); Yahel Manor (University of Haifa); Igor C. Oliveira (University of 海角社区)

The paper describing this research is available .