Quantum Advantage in Tolerant Junta Testing

We establish the first super-polynomial quantum advantage for the tolerant junta testing problem in the adaptive setting. Specifically, we show that within a certain parameter regime, tolerant k-junta testing with high precision can be solved using poly(k) quantum queries, whereas any classical algorithm requires at least kΩ(log k) queries. The problem of tolerant k-junta testing is as follows: given parameters (k, ε1, ε2), with 0 ≤ ε1 < ε2 ≤ 1/2, and black-box access to a Boolean function f (defined on n variables), distinguish whether f is ε1-close to some k-junta or ε2-far from every k-junta. We show the quantum advantage for a range of parameters close to 1/2, for example, ε1 = 1/2 − 1/k and ε2 = 1/2 − 1/(2k2). (As such, the problem is more naturally captured using the notion of correlation with closest k-junta.) The (non-adaptive) quantum tester we use was given by a recent work of Bao, Liu, Yao, Ye, and Zhang (SOSA 2026). We slightly adapt their analysis to show that it holds in the above parameter regime. On the other hand, our classical lower bound requires substantial new ideas. Inspired by the lower bound techniques of Chen and Patel (FOCS 2023), we introduce a new hard distribution of “yes” instances (i.e., instances with distance at most ε1 to k-juntas) that is based on planting an “approximate-junta” as follows: we randomly pick k out of n coordinates, and for each fixing of the k coordinates, the 2n−k values in the restricted subcube are drawn randomly except for an error-correcting code on which we place the same random bit. We show that this distribution is much closer to k-juntas than the uniform distribution, but on the other hand, they are indistinguishable with respect to any classical algorithm making ko(log k) queries.