On a uniform bound for exponential sums modulo $p^m$ for Deligne polynomials

Let $f$ be a polynomial of degree $d>1$ in $n$ variables over $\mathbb{Z}$. Let $f_d$ be the homogeneous part of degree $d$ of $f$ and $s$ be the dimension of the critical locus of $f_d$. In this paper, we prove Igusa's conjecture for exponential sums with the exponent $(n-s)/(2(d-1))$. This implies