We analyze Kumar's recent quadratic algebraic branching program size lower bound proof method (CCC 2017) for the power sum polynomial. We present a refinement of this method that gives better bounds in some cases. The lower bound relies on Noether-Lefschetz type conditions on the hypersurface defined by the homogeneous polynomial. In the explicit example that we provide, the lower bound is proved resorting to classical intersection theory. Furthermore, we use similar methods to improve the known lower bound methods for slice rank of polynomials. We consider a sequence of polynomials that have been studied before by Shioda and show that for these polynomials the improved lower bound matches the known upper bound.

We consider the problem of obtaining parameterized lower bounds for the size of arithmetic circuits computing polynomials with the degree of the polynomial as the parameter. We consider the following special classes of multilinear algebraic branching programs: 1) Read Once Oblivious Branching Programs (ROABPs), 2) Strict interval branching programs, 3) Sum of read once formulas with restricted ordering. We obtain parameterized lower bounds (i.e., n Ω( t( k)) lower bound for some function t of k) on the size of the above models computing a multilinear polynomial that can be computed by a depth four circuit of size g( k) n O(1) for some computable function g. Further, we obtain a parameterized separation between ROABPs and read-2 ABPs. This is obtained by constructing a degree k polynomial that can be computed by a read-2 ABP of small size such that the rank of the partial derivative matrix under any partition of the variables is large.