Strongly Exponential Separation Between Monotone VP and Monotone VNP

Abstract: We show that there is a sequence of explicit multilinear polynomials $P_n(x_1,\ldots,x_n)\in \mathbb{R}[x_1,\ldots,x_n]$ with non-negative coefficients that lies in monotone VNP such that any monotone algebraic circuit for $P_n$ must have size $\exp(\Omega(n)).$ This builds on (and strengthens) a result of Yehudayoff (2018) who showed a lower bound of $\exp(\tilde{\Omega}(\sqrt{n})).$