Partition functions, also known as homomorphism functions, form a rich family of graph invariants that contain combinatorial invariants such as the number of k-colourings or the number of independent sets of a graph and also the partition functions of certain "spin glass" models of statistical physics such as the Ising model.
Building on earlier work by Dyer, Greenhill and Bulatov, Grohe, we completely classify the computational complexity of partition functions. Our main result is a dichotomy theorem stating that every partition function is either computable in polynomial time or #P-complete. Partition functions are described by symmetric matrices with real entries, and we prove that it is decidable in polynomial time in terms of the matrix whether a given partition function is in polynomial time or #P-complete.
While in general it is very complicated to give an explicit algebraic or combinatorial description of the tractable cases, for partition functions described by a Hadamard matrices -- these turn out to be central in our proofs -- we obtain a simple algebraic tractability criterion, which says that the tractable cases are those "representable" by a quadratic polynomial over the field GF(2).
We consider the complexity of counting homomorphisms from an $r$-uniform hypergraph $G$ to a symmetric $r$-ary relation $H$. We give a dichotomy theorem for $r>2$, showing for which $H$ this problem is in FP and for which $H$ it is #P-complete. This generalises a theorem of Dyer and Greenhill (2000) for the case $r=2$, which corresponds to counting graph homomorphisms. Our dichotomy theorem extends to the case in which the relation $H$ is weighted, and the goal is to compute the \emph{partition function}, which is the sum of weights of the homomorphisms. This problem is motivated by statistica…
The complexity of graph homomorphism problems has been the subject of intense study. It is a long standing open problem to give a (decidable) complexity dichotomy theorem for the partition function of directed graph homomorphisms. In this paper, we prove a decidable complexity dichotomy theorem for this problem and our theorem applies to all non-negative weighted form of the problem: given any fixed matrix A with non-negative algebraic entries, the partition function Z_A(G) of directed graph homomorphisms from any directed graph G is either tractable in polynomial time or #P-hard, depending on…
Given a symmetric matrix $M\in \{0,1,*\}^{D\times D}$, an $M$-partition of a graph $G$ is a function from $V(G)$ to $D$ such that no edge of $G$ is mapped to a $0$ of $M$ and no non-edge to a $1$. We give a computer-assisted proof that, when $|D|=4$, the problem of counting the $M$-partitions of an input graph is either in FP or is #P-complete. Tractability is proved by reduction to the related problem of counting list $M$-partitions; intractability is shown using a gadget construction and interpolation. We use a computer program to determine which of the two cases holds for all but a small nu…
We give a complexity dichotomy for the problem of computing the partition function of a weighted Boolean constraint satisfaction problem. Such a problem is parameterized by a set of rational-valued functions, which generalize constraints. Each function assigns a weight to every assignment to a set of Boolean variables. Our dichotomy extends previous work in which the weight functions were restricted to being non-negative. We represent a weight function as a product of the form (-1)^s g, where the polynomial s determines the sign of the weight and the non-negative function g determines its magn…
We prove a complexity dichotomy theorem for the six-vertex model. For every setting of the parameters of the model, we prove that computing the partition function is either solvable in polynomial time or #P-hard. The dichotomy criterion is explicit.
We consider the complexity of counting weighted graph homomorphisms defined by a symmetric matrix $A$. Each symmetric matrix $A$ defines a graph homomorphism function $Z_A(\cdot)$, also known as the partition function. Dyer and Greenhill [10] established a complexity dichotomy of $Z_A(\cdot)$ for symmetric $\{0, 1\}$-matrices $A$, and they further proved that its #P-hardness part also holds for bounded degree graphs. Bulatov and Grohe [4] extended the Dyer-Greenhill dichotomy to nonnegative symmetric matrices $A$. However, their hardness proof requires graphs of arbitrarily large degree, and w…
The complexity of graph homomorphisms has been a subject of intense study [11, 12, 4, 42, 21, 17, 6, 20]. The partition function $Z_{\mathbf A}(\cdot)$ of graph homomorphism is defined by a symmetric matrix $\mathbf A$ over $\mathbb C$. We prove that the complexity dichotomy of [6] extends to bounded degree graphs. More precisely, we prove that either $G \mapsto Z_{\mathbf A}(G)$ is computable in polynomial-time for every $G$, or for some $Δ> 0$ it is #P-hard over (simple) graphs $G$ with maximum degree $Δ(G) \le Δ$. The tractability criterion on $\mathbf A$ for this dichotomy is explicit, and…
Holant problems are a framework for the analysis of counting complexity problems on graphs. This framework is simultaneously general enough to encompass many other counting problems on graphs and specific enough to allow the derivation of dichotomy results, partitioning all problem instances into those which can be solved in polynomial time and those which are #P-hard. The Holant framework is based on the theory of holographic algorithms, which was originally inspired by concepts from quantum computation, but this connection appears not to have been explored before. Here, we employ quantum inf…
We introduce an idea called anti-gadgets in complexity reductions. These combinatorial gadgets have the effect of erasing the presence of some other graph fragment, as if we had managed to include a negative copy of a graph gadget. We use this idea to prove a complexity dichotomy theorem for the partition function $Z(G)$ on 3-regular directed graphs $G$, where each edge is given a complex-valued binary function $f: \{0,1\}^2 \rightarrow \mathbb{C}$. We show that \[Z(G) = \sum_{σ: V(G) \to \{0,1\}} \prod_{(u,v) \in E(G)} f(σ(u), σ(v)),\] is either computable in polynomial time or #P-hard, depen…
We show that an effective version of Siegel's Theorem on finiteness of integer solutions and an application of elementary Galois theory are key ingredients in a complexity classification of some Holant problems. These Holant problems, denoted by Holant(f), are defined by a symmetric ternary function f that is invariant under any permutation of the k >= 3 domain elements. We prove that Holant(f) exhibits a complexity dichotomy. This dichotomy holds even when restricted to planar graphs. A special case of this result is that counting edge k-colorings is #P-hard over planar 3-regular graphs for k…
Given an integer $n\geq 1$ and an irreducible character $χ_λ$ of $S_{n}$ for some partition $λ$ of $n$, the immanant $\mathrm{imm}_λ:\mathbb{C}^{n\times n}\to\mathbb{C}$ maps matrices $A\in\mathbb{C}^{n\times n}$ to $\mathrm{imm}_λ(A)=\sum_{π\in S_{n}}χ_λ(π)\prod_{i=1}^{n}A_{i,π(i)}$. Important special cases include the determinant and permanent, which are the immanants associated with the sign and trivial character, respectively. It is known that immanants can be evaluated in polynomial time for characters that are close to the sign character: Given a partition $λ$ of $n$ with $s$ parts, let …
We prove a complexity dichotomy theorem for the eight-vertex model. For every setting of the parameters of the model, we prove that computing the partition function is either solvable in polynomial time or \#P-hard. The dichotomy criterion is explicit. For tractability, we find some new classes of problems computable in polynomial time. For \#P-hardness, we employ Möbius transformations to prove the success of interpolations.
For two integers $r, \ell \geq 0$, a graph $G = (V, E)$ is an $(r,\ell)$-graph if $V$ can be partitioned into $r$ independent sets and $\ell$ cliques. In the parameterized $(r,\ell)$-Vertex Deletion problem, given a graph $G$ and an integer $k$, one has to decide whether at most $k$ vertices can be removed from $G$ to obtain an $(r,\ell)$-graph. This problem is NP-hard if $r+\ell \geq 1$ and encompasses several relevant problems such as Vertex Cover and Odd Cycle Transversal. The parameterized complexity of $(r,\ell)$-Vertex Deletion was known for all values of $(r,\ell)$ except for $(2,1)$, $…
We prove a complexity dichotomy theorem for Holant problems over an arbitrary set of complex-valued symmetric constraint functions F on Boolean variables. This extends and unifies all previous dichotomies for Holant problems on symmetric constraint functions (taking values without a finite modulus). We define and characterize all symmetric vanishing signatures. They turned out to be essential to the complete classification of Holant problems. The dichotomy theorem has an explicit tractability criterion expressible in terms of holographic transformations. A Holant problem defined by a set of co…
We prove a complexity dichotomy theorem for a class of Holant problems on planar 3-regular bipartite graphs. The complexity dichotomy states that for every weighted constraint function $f$ defining the problem (the weights can even be negative), the problem is either computable in polynomial time if $f$ satisfies a tractability criterion, or \#P-hard otherwise. One particular problem in this problem space is a long-standing open problem of Moore and Robson on counting Cubic Planar X3C. The dichotomy resolves this problem by showing that it is \numP-hard. Our proof relies on the machinery of si…
Sparse-dense partitions was introduced by Feder, Hell, Klein, and Motwani [STOC 1999, SIDMA 2003] as a tool to solve partitioning problems. In this paper, the following result concerning independent sets in graphs having sparse-dense partitions is presented: if a $n$-vertex graph $G$ admits a sparse-dense partition concerning classes $\mathcal S$ and $\mathcal D$, where $\mathcal D$ is a subclass of the complement of $K_t$-free graphs (for some ~$t$), and graphs in $\mathcal S$ can be recognized in polynomial time, then: enumerate all maximal independent sets of $G$ (or find its maximum) can b…
We explore the intricate interdependent relationship among counting problems, considered from three frameworks for such problems: Holant Problems, counting CSP and weighted H-colorings. We consider these problems for general complex valued functions that take boolean inputs. We show that results from one framework can be used to derive results in another, and this happens in both directions. Holographic reductions discover an underlying unity, which is only revealed when these counting problems are investigated in the complex domain $\mathbb{C}$. We prove three complexity dichotomy theorems, l…
We study the complexity of approximately evaluating the Ising and Tutte partition functions with complex parameters. Our results are partly motivated by the study of the quantum complexity classes BQP and IQP. Recent results show how to encode quantum computations as evaluations of classical partition functions. These results rely on interesting and deep results about quantum computation in order to obtain hardness results about the difficulty of (classically) evaluating the partition functions for certain fixed parameters. The motivation for this paper is to study more comprehensively the com…
Given a symmetric D*D matrix M over {0,1,*}, a list M-partition of a graph G is a partition of G's vertices into D parts associated with the rows of M. The part of each vertex is chosen from a given list so that no edge of G maps to a 0 in M and no non-edge of G maps to a 1 in M. Many important graph-theoretic structures can be represented as list M-partitions, such as graph colourings, split graphs and homogeneous sets and pairs, which arise in the proofs of the weak and strong perfect graph conjectures. There has been quite a bit of work on determining for which matrices M computations invol…
The logic MMSNP is a restricted fragment of existential second-order logic which allows to express many interesting queries in graph theory and finite model theory. The logic was introduced by Feder and Vardi who showed that every MMSNP sentence is computationally equivalent to a finite-domain constraint satisfaction problem (CSP); the involved probabilistic reductions were derandomized by Kun using explicit constructions of expander structures. We present a new proof of the reduction to finite-domain CSPs which does not rely on the results of Kun. This new proof allows us to obtain a stronger…
We determine the computational complexity of approximately counting the total weight of variable assignments for every complex-weighted Boolean constraint satisfaction problem (or CSP) with any number of additional unary (i.e., arity 1) constraints, particularly, when degrees of input instances are bounded from above by a fixed constant. All degree-1 counting CSPs are obviously solvable in polynomial time. When the instance's degree is more than two, we present a dichotomy theorem that classifies all counting CSPs admitting free unary constraints into exactly two categories. This classificatio…
We prove a complexity dichotomy for a class of counting problems expressible as bipartite 3-regular Holant problems. For every problem of the form $\operatorname{Holant}\left(f\mid =_3 \right)$, where $f$ is any integer-valued ternary symmetric constraint function on Boolean variables, we prove that it is either P-time computable or #P-hard, depending on an explicit criterion of $f$. The constraint function can take both positive and negative values, allowing for cancellations. The dichotomy extends easily to rational valued functions of the same type. In addition, we discover a new phenomenon…
We present a framework for the complexity classification of parameterized counting problems that can be formulated as the summation over the numbers of homomorphisms from small pattern graphs H_1,...,H_l to a big host graph G with the restriction that the coefficients correspond to evaluations of the Möbius function over the lattice of a graphic matroid. This generalizes the idea of Curticapean, Dell and Marx [STOC 17] who used a result of Lovász stating that the number of subgraph embeddings from a graph H to a graph G can be expressed as such a sum over the lattice of partitions of H. In the…
We develop the novel machinery of smooth approximations, and apply it to confirm the CSP dichotomy conjecture for first-order reducts of the random tournament, various homogeneous graphs including the random graph, and for expansions of the order of the rationals. Apart from obtaining these dichotomy results, we show how our new proof technique allows to unify and significantly simplify the previous results from the literature. For all but the last structure, we moreover characterize those CSPs which are solvable by local consistency methods, again using the same machinery.
We prove a complexity dichotomy theorem for symmetric complex-weighted Boolean #CSP when the constraint graph of the input must be planar. The problems that are #P-hard over general graphs but tractable over planar graphs are precisely those with a holographic reduction to matchgates. This generalizes a theorem of Cai, Lu, and Xia for the case of real weights. We also obtain a dichotomy theorem for a symmetric arity 4 signature with complex weights in the planar Holant framework, which we use in the proof of our #CSP dichotomy. In particular, we reduce the problem of evaluating the Tutte polyn…
We show that the Graph Isomorphism (GI) problem and the related problems of String Isomorphism (under group action) (SI) and Coset Intersection (CI) can be solved in quasipolynomial ($\exp((\log n)^{O(1)})$) time. The best previous bound for GI was $\exp(O(\sqrt{n\log n}))$, where $n$ is the number of vertices (Luks, 1983); for the other two problems, the bound was similar, $\exp(\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n}))$, where $n$ is the size of the permutation domain (Babai, 1983). The algorithm builds on Luks's SI framework and attacks the barrier configurations for Luks's algorithm by group theoretic "local c…
