Counting Homomorphisms to $K_4$-minor-free Graphs, modulo 2

Autor: Jacob Focke, Marc Roth, Stanislav Živný, Leslie Ann Goldberg
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA)
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2006.16632
Popis: We study the problem of computing the parity of the number of homomorphisms from an input graph $G$ to a fixed graph $H$. Faben and Jerrum [Theory Comput., 11 (2015), pp. 35--57] introduced an explicit criterion on the graph $H$ and conjectured that, if satisfied, the problem is solvable in polynomial time and, otherwise, the problem is complete for the complexity class $\oplus{P}$ of parity problems. We verify their conjecture for all graphs $H$ that exclude the complete graph on four vertices as a minor. Further, we rule out the existence of a subexponential-time algorithm for the $\oplus{P}$-complete cases, assuming the randomized exponential time hypothesis. Our proofs introduce a novel method of deriving hardness from globally defined substructures of the fixed graph $H$. Using this, we subsume all prior progress toward resolving the conjecture (Faben and Jerrum [Theory Comput., 11 (2015), pp. 35--57]; Göbel, Goldberg, and Richerby [ACM Trans. Comput. Theory, 6 (2014), 17; ACM Trans. Comput. Theory, 8 (2016), 12]). As special cases, our machinery also yields a proof of the conjecture for graphs with maximum degree at most 3, as well as a full classification for the problem of counting list homomorphisms, modulo 2.
Databáze: OpenAIRE