Sparse Selfreducible Sets and Nonuniform Lower Bounds

It is well-known that the class of sets that can be computed by polynomial size circuits is equal to the class of sets that are polynomial time reducible to a sparse set. It is widely believed, but unfortunately up to now unproven, that there are sets in EXP^NP, or even in EXP that are not computable by polynomial size circuits and hence are not reducible to a sparse set. In this paper we study this question in a more restricted setting: what is the computational complexity of sparse sets that are selfreducible? It follows from earlier work of Lozano and Torán (in: Mathematical systems theory, 1991) that EXP^NP does not have sparse selfreducible hard sets. We define a natural version of selfreduction, tree-selfreducibility, and show that NEXP does not have sparse tree-selfreducible hard sets. We also construct an oracle relative to which all of EXP is reducible to a sparse tree-selfreducible set. These lower bounds are corollaries of more general results about the computational complexity of sparse sets that are selfreducible, and can be interpreted as super-polynomial circuit lower bounds for NEXP.