Contractors for flows

We answer a question raised by Lov\'asz and B. Szegedy [Contractors and connectors in graph algebras, J. Graph Theory 60:1 (2009)] asking for a contractor for the graph parameter counting the number of B-flows of a graph, where B is a subset of a finite Abelian group closed under inverses. We prove our main result using the duality between flows and tensions and finite Fourier analysis. We exhibit several examples of contractors for B-flows, which are of interest in relation to the family of B-flow conjectures formulated by Tutte, Fulkerson, Jaeger, and others.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figur

Near-Optimal Cayley Expanders for Abelian Groups

We give an efficient deterministic algorithm that outputs an expanding generating set for any finite abelian group. The size of the generating set is close to the randomized construction of Alon and Roichman [Alon and Roichman, 1994], improving upon various deterministic constructions in both the dependence on the dimension and the spectral gap. By obtaining optimal dependence on the dimension we resolve a conjecture of Azar, Motwani, and Naor [Azar et al., 1998] in the affirmative. Our technique is an extension of the bias amplification technique of Ta-Shma [Ta-Shma, 2017], who used random walks on expanders to obtain expanding generating sets over the additive group of ???. As a consequence, we obtain (i) randomness-efficient constructions of almost k-wise independent variables, (ii) a faster deterministic algorithm for the Remote Point Problem, (iii) randomness-efficient low-degree tests, and (iv) randomness-efficient verification of matrix multiplication