Non-Malleable Affine Extractors with Small Error and Complexity Lower Bounds

Source abstract

We construct explicit non-malleable affine extractors for every constant entropy rate, with linear output length and exponentially small error, against any fixed number of affine tamperings without fixed points. For every fixed $0 0$. Our extractors derandomize the lossless lifting of Efremenko and Itsykson (STOC 2026). For every fixed $0<ξ<1$, this gives explicit polynomial-size unsatisfiable CNFs on $N$ variables whose $\mathrm{Res}(\oplus)$ refutations of resolution depth at most $N$ require size at least $2^{(1-ξ)N}$. Separately, parity substitutions give polynomial-size CNFs on $N$ variables with polynomial-size ordinary-resolution proofs for which every $\mathrm{Res}(\oplus)$ refutation of size $S$ and depth $d$ satisfies $d\log(2S)=Ω(N^2)$. This removes the $\log^2 N$ loss in the tradeoff of Itsykson, Podolskii, and Shekhovtsov (CCC 2026).