Bilinear forms with trace functions

Abstract: We obtain non-trivial bounds for bilinear sums of trace functions below the Pólya-Vinogradov range assuming only that the geometric monodromy group of the underlying ell-adic sheaf satisfies certain simple structural properties, in contrast to previous works which handled only special cases of Kloosterman and hypergeometric sheaves. Our approach builds on a general "soft" stratification theorem for sums of products of trace functions, based on an idea of Junyan Xu, combined with a new robust version of the Goursat-Kolchin-Ribet criterion.