Three XOR-Lemmas - An Exposition

We provide an exposition of three lemmas that relate general properties of distributions over bit strings to the exclusive-or (xor) of values of certain bit locations. The first XOR-Lemma, commonly attributed to Umesh Vazirani (1986), relates the statistical distance of a distribution from the uniform distribution over bit strings to the maximum bias of the xor of certain bit positions. The second XOR-Lemma, due to Umesh and Vijay Vazirani (19th STOC, 1987), is a computational analogue of the first. It relates the pseudorandomness of a distribution to the difficulty of predicting the xor of bits in particular or random positions. The third Lemma, due to Goldreich and Levin (21st STOC, 1989), relates the difficulty of retrieving a string and the unpredictability of the xor of random bit positions. The most notable XOR Lemma – that is the so-called Yao XOR Lemma – is not discussed here. We focus on the proofs of the aforementioned three lemma. Our exposition deviates from the original proofs, yielding proofs that are believed to be simpler, of wider applicability, and establishing somewhat stronger quantitative results. Credits for these improved proofs are due to several researchers.