4d/3d reduction of s-confining theories: the role of the "exotic" D instantons

The reduction of 4d Seiberg duality to 3d by compactification on a circle is possible if finite size effects are considered. These effects boil down to the contribution of KK monopole operators acting as instantons in 3d, and they are crucial to preserve the 4d duality in 3d. This mechanism has been reproduced in string theory by T-duality on the type IIA brane setup. In some cases the 4d dual "magnetic" theories are IR confined descriptions of the UV gauge theories. In these cases the monopoles are absent in the IR dynamics and the mechanism of reduction of the 4d duality has to be modified. In this paper we investigate such modification in the brane setup. The main observation behind our analysis is that in the 4d case the superpotential of the confined theories can been obtained also from the "exotic" contribution of a D0 brane, a stringy instanton. When considering these configurations we reproduce the field theory results in the brane setup. We study both the unitary and the symplectic case. As a further check we provide the interpretation of the mechanism in terms of localization.