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Description:
A problem is downward self-reducible if it can be solved efficiently given an oracle that returns solutions for strictly smaller instances. In the decisional landscape, downward self-reducibility is well studied and it is known that all downward self-reducible problems are in PSPACE. In this paper, we initiate the study of downward self-reducible search problems which are guaranteed to have a solution - that is, the downward self-reducible problems in TFNP. We show that most natural PLS-complete problems are downward self-reducible and any downward self-reducible problem in TFNP is contained in PLS. Furthermore, if the downward self-reducible problem is in TFUP (i.e. it has a unique solution), then it is actually contained in UEOPL, a subclass of CLS. This implies that if integer factoring is downward self-reducible then it is in fact in UEOPL, suggesting that no efficient factoring algorithm exists using the factorization of smaller numbers.