International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We present a new and conceptually simpler proof of a tight parallel-repetition theorem for public-coin arguments (Pass-Venkitasubramaniam, STOC\'07, Hastad et al, TCC\'10, Chung-Liu, TCC\'10). We follow the same proof framework as the previous non-tight parallel-repetition theorem of Hastad et al---which relied on *statistical distance* to measure the distance between experiments---and show that it can be made tight (and further simplied) if instead relying on *KL-divergence* as the distance between the experiments.

We then show that our proof technique directly yields tight ``Chernoff-type\'\' parallel-repetition theorems (where one considers a ``threshold\'\' verifier that accepts iff the prover manages to convince a certain fraction of the parallel verifiers, as opposed to all of them) for any public-coin interactive argument; previously, tight results were only known for either constant-round protocols, or when the gap between the threshold and the original error-probability is a constant.