Szemeredi's regularity lemma is an important tool in graph theory which has applications throughout combinatorics.
In this paper we prove an analogue of Szemeredi's regularity lemma in the context of abelian groups and use it to derive some results in additive number theory.
One is a structure theorm for sets which are almost sum-free. If A is a subset of [N] which contains just o(N^2) triples (x,y,z) such that x + y = z then A may be written as the union of B and C, where B is sum-free and |C| = o(N).
Another answers a question of Bergelson, Host and Kra. If alpha, epsilon > 0, if N > N_0(alpha,epsilon) and if A is a subset of {1,...,N} of size alpha N, then there is some non-zero d such that A contains at least (alpha^3 - epsilon)N three-term arithmetic progressions with common difference d.
We give a short proof of Szemerédi's regularity lemma, based on elementary Euclidean geometry. The general line of the proof is that of the standard proof (in fact, of Szemerédi's original proof), but most technicalities are swallowed by applying Pythagoras' theorem.
Szemerédi's Regularity Lemma is an important tool for analyzing the structure of dense graphs. There are versions of the Regularity Lemma for sparse graphs, but these only apply when the graph satisfies some local density condition. In this paper, we prove a sparse Regularity Lemma that holds for all graphs. More generally, we give a Regularity Lemma that holds for arbitrary real matrices.
Szemerédi's regularity lemma is a basic tool in graph theory, and also plays an important role in additive combinatorics, most notably in proving Szemerédi's theorem on arithmetic progressions . In this note we revisit this lemma from the perspective of probability theory and information theory instead of graph theory, and observe a variant of this lemma which introduces a new parameter $F$. This stronger version of the regularity lemma was iterated in a recent paper of the author to reprove the analogous regularity lemma for hypergraphs.
In this manuscript we develop a version of Szemerédi's regularity lemma that is suitable for analyzing multicolorings of complete graphs and directed graphs. In this, we follow the proof of Alon, Fischer, Krivelevich and M. Szegedy [Combinatorica, 20(4) (2000), 451--476] who prove a similar result for graphs. The purpose is to extend classical results on dense hereditary properties, such as the speed of the property or edit distance, to the above-mentioned combinatorial objects.
We show that if G is a group and A is a finite subset of G with |A^2| < K|A|, then for all k there is a symmetric neighbourhood of the identity S with S^k a subset of A^2A^{-2} and |S| > exp(-K^{O(k)})|A|.
We prove a variant of the abstract probabilistic version of Szemerédi's regularity lemma, due to Tao, which applies to a number of structures (including graphs, hypergraphs, hypercubes, graphons, and many more) and works for random variables in $L_p$ for any $p>1$. Our approach is based on martingale difference sequences.
We prove analogues for hypergraphs of Szemerédi's regularity lemma and the associated counting lemma for graphs. As an application, we give the first combinatorial proof of the multidimensional Szemerédi theorem of Furstenberg and Katznelson, and the first proof that provides an explicit bound. Similar results with the same consequences have been obtained independently by Nagle, Rödl, Schacht and Skokan.
We show that a sufficiently large graph of bounded degree can be decomposed into quasi-homogeneous pieces. The result can be viewed as a "finitarization" of the classical Farrell-Varadarajan Ergodic Decomposition Theorem.
We extend Szemeredi's Regularity Lemma (SRL) to abstract measure spaces. Our main aim is to find general conditions under which the original proof of Szemeredi still works. To illustrate that our approach has some merit, we outline several applications. Some of these applications seem to be tailored to our approach: in particular, we are not aware of any alternative proofs.
We give a proof of Szemeredi's regularity lemma in the special case of a graph with bounded VC dimension and show that it is possible to obtain "merely" doubly exponential bounds on the size of the partition in this case.
Szemerédi's regularity lemma is a fundamental tool in extremal combinatorics. However, the original version is only helpful in studying dense graphs. In the 1990s, Kohayakawa and Rödl proved an analogue of Szemerédi's regularity lemma for sparse graphs as part of a general program toward extending extremal results to sparse graphs. Many of the key applications of Szemerédi's regularity lemma use an associated counting lemma. In order to prove extensions of these results which also apply to sparse graphs, it remained a well-known open problem to prove a counting lemma in sparse graphs. The main…
Green [Geometric and Functional Analysis 15 (2005), 340--376] established a version of the Szemerédi Regularity Lemma for abelian groups and derived the Removal Lemma for abelian groups as its corollary. We provide another proof of his Removal Lemma that allows us to extend its statement to all finite groups. We also discuss possible extensions of the Removal Lemma to systems of equations.
We give a brief exposition and proof of the arithmetic regularity lemma of Green and Tao in the abelian ($U^2$) case, over $\{1,\dots,N\}$. This may be useful to those who need just the $U^2$ case of the lemma, as the general case is significantly more involved. It may also be useful as an introduction to the general case. No originality is claimed.
Szemerédi's regularity lemma is a fundamental tool in extremal graph theory, theoretical computer science and combinatorial number theory. Lovász and Szegedy [L. Lovász and B. Szegedy: Szemerédi's Lemma for the analyst, Geometric and Functional Analysis 17 (2007), 252-270] gave a Hilbert space interpretation of the lemma and an interpretation in terms of compact- ness of the space of graph limits. In this paper we prove several compactness results in a Banach space setting, generalising results of Lovász and Szegedy as well as a result of Borgs, Chayes, Cohn and Zhao [C. Borgs, J.T. Chayes, H.…
A celebrated result of Gowers states that for every ε> 0 there is a graph G so that every ε-regular partition of G (in the sense of Szemeredi's regularity lemma) has order given by a tower of exponents of height polynomial in 1/ε. In this note we give a new proof of this result that uses a construction and proof of correctness that are significantly simpler and shorter.
Szemeredi's regularity lemma is one instance in a family of regularity lemmas, replacing the definition of density of a graph by a more general coefficient. Recently, Fan Chung proved another instance, a regularity lemma for clustering graphs, and asked whether good upper bounds could be derived for the quantitative estimates it supplies. We answer this question in the negative, for every generalized regularity lemma.
Recent work of Gowers and Nagle, Rödl, Schacht, and Skokan has established a hypergraph removal lemma, which in turn implies some results of Szemerédi and Furstenberg-Katznelson concerning one-dimensional and multi-dimensional arithmetic progressions respectively. In this paper we shall give a self-contained proof of this hypergraph removal lemma. In fact we prove a slight strengthening of the result, which we will use in a subsequent paper to establish infinitely many constellations of a prescribed shape in the Gaussian primes.
We present a general framework to represent discrete configuration systems using hypergraphs. This representation allows one to transfer combinatorial removal lemmas to their analogues for configuration systems. These removal lemmas claim that a system without many configurations can be made configuration-free by removing a few of its constituent elements. As applications of this approach we give, an alternative proof of the removal lemma for permutations by Cooper, a general version of a removal lemma for linear systems in finite abelian groups, an interpretation of the mentioned removal lemm…
Let $X$ be an inner product space, let $G$ be a group of orthogonal transformations of $X$, and let $R$ be a bounded $G$-stable subset of $X$. We define very weak and very strong regularity for such pairs $(R,G)$ (in the sense of Szemerédi's regularity lemma), and prove that these two properties are equivalent. Moreover, these properties are equivalent to the compactness of the space $(B(H),d_R)/G$. Here $H$ is the completion of $X$ (a Hilbert space), $B(H)$ is the unit ball in $H$, $d_R$ is the metric on $H$ given by $d_R(x,y):=\sup_{r\in R}|<r,x-y>|$, and $(B(H),d_R)/G$ is the orbit space of…
In the present paper we propose generalizations of the regularity and counting lemmas for multidimensional matrices under a finite alphabet. Firstly, we prove a variant of a multidimensional regularity lemma with the help of a translation of $\varepsilon$-regularity from graphs to matrices. Next, we state that this $\varepsilon$-regularity is sufficient for obtaining a matrix analogue of the counting lemma for $2$-dimensional matrices but not for higher-dimensional cases. Finally, we introduce $\varepsilon$-regular patterns that allow us to deduce a multidimensional counting lemma.
We study the integral and measure theory of the ultraproduct of finite sets. As a main application we construct limit objects for hypergraph sequences. We give a new proof for the Hypergraph Removal Lemma and the Hypergraph Regularity Lemma.
We introduce a permutation analogue of the celebrated Szemeredi Regularity Lemma, and derive a number of consequences. This tool allows us to provide a structural description of permutations which avoid a specified pattern, a result that permutations which scatter small intervals contain all possible patterns of a given size, a proof that every permutation avoiding a specified pattern has a nearly monotone linear-sized subset, and a ``thin deletion'' result. We also show how one can count sub-patterns of a permutation with an integral, and relate our results to permutation quasirandomness in a…
We show that $m$ points and $n$ two-dimensional algebraic surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^4$ can have at most $O(m^{\frac{k}{2k-1}}n^{\frac{2k-2}{2k-1}}+m+n)$ incidences, provided that the algebraic surfaces behave like pseudoflats with $k$ degrees of freedom, and that $m\leq n^{\frac{2k+2}{3k}}$. As a special case, we obtain a Szemerédi-Trotter type theorem for 2--planes in $\mathbb{R}^4$, provided $m\leq n$ and the planes intersect transversely. As a further special case, we obtain a Szemerédi-Trotter type theorem for complex lines in $\mathbb{C}^2$ with no restrictions on $m$ and $n$ (this theorem …
Let G be a finite graph with the non-k-order property (essentially, a uniform finite bound on the size of an induced sub-half-graph). A major result of the paper applies model-theoretic arguments to obtain a stronger version of Szemerédi's regularity lemma for such graphs, Theorem 5.18, in which there are no irregular pairs, the bounds are significantly improved, and each component satisfies an indivisibility condition. Motivation for this work comes from a coincidence of model-theoretic and graph-theoretic ideas. Namely, it was known that the "irregular pairs" in the statement of Szemerédi's …
We prove an extension of the Regularity Lemma with vertex and edge weights which can be applied for a large class of graphs. The applications involve random graphs and a weighted version of the Erdős-Stone theorem. We also provide means to handle the otherwise uncontrolled exceptional set.
We introduce a new method for decomposing the edge set of a graph, and use it to replace the Regularity lemma of Szemerédi in some graph embedding problems. An algorithmic version is also given.
Szemerédi's regularity lemma and its variants are some of the most powerful tools in combinatorics. In this paper, we establish several results around the regularity lemma. First, we prove that whether or not we include the condition that the desired vertex partition in the regularity lemma is equitable has a minimal effect on the number of parts of the partition. Second, we use an algorithmic version of the (weak) Frieze--Kannan regularity lemma to give a substantially faster deterministic approximation algorithm for counting subgraphs in a graph. Previously, only an exponential dependence fo…
We prove an algorithmic regularity lemma for $L_p$ regular matrices $(1 < p \leq \infty),$ a class of sparse $\{0,1\}$ matrices which obey a natural pseudorandomness condition. This extends a result of Coja-Oghlan, Cooper and Frieze who treated the case of $L_{\infty}$ regular matrices. We also present applications of this result for tensors and MAX-CSP instances.
The regularity lemma is a stringent condition of the possible ranks of tensor blow-ups of linear subspaces of matrices. It was proved by Ivanyos, Qiao and Subrahmanyam when the underlying field is sufficiently large. We show that if the field size is too small, the regularity lemma is false.
Szemeredi's regularity lemma can be viewed as a rough structure theorem for arbitrary dense graphs, decomposing such graphs into a structured piece (a partition into cells with edge densities), a small error (corresponding to irregular cells), and a uniform piece (the pseudorandom deviations from the edge densities). We establish an arithmetic regularity lemma that similarly decomposes bounded functions f : [N] -> C, into a (well-equidistributed, virtual) -step nilsequence, an error which is small in L^2 and a further error which is miniscule in the Gowers U^{s+1}-norm, where s is a positive i…
We introduce a new variant of Szemerédi's regularity lemma which we call the "sparse regular approximation lemma" (SRAL). The input to this lemma is a graph $G$ of edge density $p$ and parameters $ε, δ$, where we think of $δ$ as a constant. The goal is to construct an $ε$-regular partition of $G$ while having the freedom to add/remove up to $δ|E(G)|$ edges. As we show here, this weaker variant of the regularity lemma already suffices for proving the graph removal lemma and the hypergraph regularity lemma, which are two of the main applications of the (standard) regularity lemma. This of course…
We show, for any positive integer k, that there exists a graph in which any equitable partition of its vertices into k parts has at least ck^2/\log^* k pairs of parts which are not ε-regular, where c,ε>0 are absolute constants. This bound is tight up to the constant c and addresses a question of Gowers on the number of irregular pairs in Szemerédi's regularity lemma. In order to gain some control over irregular pairs, another regularity lemma, known as the strong regularity lemma, was developed by Alon, Fischer, Krivelevich, and Szegedy. For this lemma, we prove a lower bound of wowzer-type, w…
Szemerédi's regularity lemma is a powerful tool in graph theory. It states that for every large enough graph, there exists a partition of the edge set with bounded size such that most induced subgraphs are quasirandom. When the graph is a definable set $ϕ(x, y)$ in a finite field $F_q$, Tao's algebraic graph regularity lemma shows that there is a partition of the graph $ϕ(x, y)$ such that all induced subgraphs are quasirandom and the error bound on quasirandomness is $O(q^{-1/4})$. In this work we prove an algebraic hypergraph regularity lemma for definable sets in finite fields, thus answerin…
Advancing the sparse regularity method, we prove one-sided and two-sided regularity inheritance lemmas for subgraphs of bijumbled graphs, improving on results of Conlon, Fox and Zhao [Adv. Math. 256 (2014), 206--290]. These inheritance lemmas also imply improved $H$-counting lemmas for subgraphs of bijumbled graphs, for some $H$.
We prove a version of Szemeredi's regularity lemma for subsets of a typical random set in F_p^n. As an application, a result on the distribution of three-term arithmetic progressions in sparse sets is discussed.
In a recent paper, Chernikov and Starchenko prove that graphs defined in distal theories have strong regularity properties, generalizing previous results about graphs defined by semi-algebraic relations. We give a shorter, purely model-theoretic proof of this fact.
Green proved an arithmetic analogue of Szemerédi's celebrated regularity lemma and used it to verify a conjecture of Bergelson, Host, and Kra which sharpens Roth's theorem on three-term arithmetic progressions in dense sets. It shows that for every subset of $\mathbb{F}_p^n$ with $n$ sufficiently large, the density of three-term arithmetic progressions with some nonzero common difference is at least the random bound (the cube of the set density) up to an additive $ε$. For a fixed odd prime $p$, we prove that the required dimension grows as an exponential tower of $p$'s of height $Θ(\log(1/ε))$…
The regularity lemma of Szemeredi asserts that one can partition every graph into a bounded number of quasi-random bipartite graphs. In some applications however, one would like to have a strong control on how quasi-random these bipartite graphs are. Alon, Fischer, Krivelevich and Szegedy obtained a powerful variant of the regularity lemma, which allows one to have an arbitrary control on this measure of quasi-randomness. However, their proof only guaranteed to produce a partition where the number of parts is given by the Wowzer function, which is the iterated version of the Tower function. We…
We present a regularity lemma for Boolean functions $f:\{-1,1\}^n \to \{-1,1\}$ based on noisy influence, a measure of how locally correlated $f$ is with each input bit. We provide an application of the regularity lemma to weaken the conditions on the Majority is Stablest Theorem. We also prove a "homogenized" version stating that there is a set of input bits so that most restrictions of $f$ on those bits have small noisy influences. These results were sketched out by [OSTW10], but never published. With their permission, we present the full details here.
We present a systematic study of the regularity phenomena for NIP hypergraphs and connections to the theory of (locally) generically stable measures, providing a model-theoretic hypergraph version of the results from [L. Lovász, B. Szegedy, "Regularity partitions and the topology of graphons", An irregular mind, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010, 415-446]. Besides, we revise the two extremal cases of regularity for stable and distal hypergraphs, improving and generalizing the results from [A. Chernikov, S. Starchenko, "Regularity lemma for distal structures", J. Eur. Math. Soc. 20 (2018), 2437-…
The hypergraph regularity lemma -- the extension of Szemerédi's graph regularity lemma to the setting of $k$-uniform hypergraphs -- is one of the most celebrated combinatorial results obtained in the past decade. By now there are several (very different) proofs of this lemma, obtained by Gowers, by Nagle-Rödl-Schacht-Skokan and by Tao. Unfortunately, what all these proofs have in common is that they yield regular partitions whose order is given by the $k$-th Ackermann function. In a recent paper we have shown that these bounds are unavoidable for $3$-uniform hypergraphs. In this paper we exten…
Let $G$ be an abelian group of bounded exponent and $A \subseteq G$. We show that if the collection of translates of $A$ has VC dimension at most $d$, then for every $ε>0$ there is a subgroup $H$ of $G$ of index at most $ε^{-d-o(1)}$ such that one can add or delete at most $ε|G|$ elements to/from $A$ to make it a union of $H$-cosets. We also establish a removal lemma with polynomial bounds, with applications to property testing, for induced bipartite patterns in a finite abelian group with bounded exponent.
We study the spectral aspects of the graph limit theory. We give a description of graphon convergence in terms of converegnce of eigenvalues and eigenspaces. Along these lines we prove a spectral version of the strong regularity lemma. Using spectral methods we investigate group actions on graphons. As an application we show that the set of isometry invariant graphons on the sphere is closed in terms of graph convergence however the analogous statement does not hold for the circle. This fact is rooted in the representation theory of the orthogonal group.
The hypergraph regularity lemma -- the extension of Szemerédi's graph regularity lemma to the setting of $k$-uniform hypergraphs -- is one of the most celebrated combinatorial results obtained in the past decade. By now there are several (very different) proofs of this lemma, obtained by Gowers, by Nagle-Rödl-Schacht-Skokan and by Tao. Unfortunately, what all these proofs have in common is that they yield regular partitions whose order is given by the $k$-th Ackermann function. We show that such Ackermann-type bounds are unavoidable for every $k \ge 2$, thus confirming a prediction of Tao. Pri…
We present a unified approach to proving Ramsey-type theorems for graphs with a forbidden induced subgraph which can be used to extend and improve the earlier results of Rodl, Erdos-Hajnal, Promel-Rodl, Nikiforov, Chung-Graham, and Luczak-Rodl. The proofs are based on a simple lemma (generalizing one by Graham, Rodl, and Rucinski) that can be used as a replacement for Szemeredi's regularity lemma, thereby giving much better bounds. The same approach can be also used to show that pseudo-random graphs have strong induced Ramsey properties. This leads to explicit constructions for upper bounds on…
Obtaining an efficient bound for the triangle removal lemma is one of the most outstanding open problems of extremal combinatorics. Perhaps the main bottleneck for achieving this goal is that triangle-free graphs can be highly unstructured. For example, triangle-free graphs might have only regular partitions (in the sense of Szemerédi) of tower-type size. And indeed, essentially all the graph properties ${\cal P}$ for which removal lemmas with reasonable bounds were obtained, are such that every graph satisfying ${\cal P}$ has a small regular partition. So in some sense, a barrier for obtainin…
Fox, Gromov, Lafforgue, Naor, and Pach proved a regularity lemma for semi-algebraic $k$-uniform hypergraphs of bounded complexity, showing that for each $ε>0$ the vertex set can be equitably partitioned into a bounded number of parts (in terms of $ε$ and the complexity) so that all but an $ε$-fraction of the $k$-tuples of parts are homogeneous. We prove that the number of parts can be taken to be polynomial in $1/ε$. Our improved regularity lemma can be applied to geometric problems and to the following general question on property testing: is it possible to decide, with query complexity polyn…
As an application of Szemeredi's regularity lemma, Erdos-Frankl-Rodl (1986) showed that the number of graphs on vertex set {1,2,...n} with a monotone class P is $2^{(1+o(1))ex(n,P)n^2/2}$ where $ex(n,P)$ is the maximum number of edges of an n-vertex graph which has no subgraph in P. Kohayakawa et al. (2003) extended it from monotone to hereditary and from graphs to 3-uniform hypergraphs. We extend it to general hypergraphs. This may be a simple example illustrating how to apply a recent hypergraph regularity lemma by the author.
We prove a regularity lemma with respect to arbitrary Keisler measures mu on V, nu on W where the bipartite graph (V,W,R) is definable in a saturated structure M and the formula R(x,y) is stable. The proof is rather quick and uses local stability theory. The special case where (V,W,R) is pseudofinite, mu, nu are the counting measures and M is suitably chosen (for example a nonstandard model of set theory), yields the stable regularity theorem of Malliaris-Shelah (Transactions AMS, 366, 2014, 1551-1585), though without explicit bounds or equitability.
