Logical Equivalences, Homomorphism Indistinguishability, and Forbidden Minors

Two graphs $G$ and $H$ are homomorphism indistinguishable over a class of graphs $\mathcal{F}$ if for all graphs $F \in \mathcal{F}$ the number of homomorphisms from $F$ to $G$ is equal to the number of homomorphisms from $F$ to $H$. Many natural equivalence relations comparing graphs such as (quantum) isomorphism, spectral, and logical equivalences can be characterised as homomorphism indistinguishability relations over certain graph classes. Abstracting from the wealth of such instances, we show in this paper that equivalences w.r.t. any self-complementarity logic admitting a characterisation as homomorphism indistinguishability relation can be characterised by homomorphism indistinguishability over a minor-closed graph class. Self-complementarity is a mild property satisfied by most well-studied logics. This result follows from a correspondence between closure properties of a graph class and preservation properties of its homomorphism indistinguishability relation. Furthermore, we classify all graph classes which are in a sense finite (essentially profinite) and satisfy the maximality condition of being homomorphism distinguishing closed, i.e. adding any graph to the class strictly refines its homomorphism indistinguishability relation. Thereby, we answer various question raised by Roberson (2022) on general properties of the homomorphism distinguishing closure.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

An Algorithmic Meta Theorem for Homomorphism Indistinguishability

Two graphs G and H are homomorphism indistinguishable over a family of graphs ℱ if for all graphs F ∈ ℱ the number of homomorphisms from F to G is equal to the number of homomorphism from F to H. Many natural equivalence relations comparing graphs such as (quantum) isomorphism, cospectrality, and logical equivalences can be characterised as homomorphism indistinguishability relations over various graph classes. The wealth of such results motivates a more fundamental study of homomorphism indistinguishability. From a computational perspective, the central object of interest is the decision problem HomInd(ℱ) which asks to determine whether two input graphs G and H are homomorphism indistinguishable over a fixed graph class ℱ. The problem HomInd(ℱ) is known to be decidable only for few graph classes ℱ. Due to a conjecture by Roberson (2022) and results by Seppelt (MFCS 2023), homomorphism indistinguishability relations over minor-closed graph classes are of special interest. We show that HomInd(ℱ) admits a randomised polynomial-time algorithm for every minor-closed graph class ℱ of bounded treewidth. This result extends to a version of HomInd where the graph class ℱ is specified by a sentence in counting monadic second-order logic and a bound k on the treewidth, which are given as input. For fixed k, this problem is randomised fixed-parameter tractable. If k is part of the input, then it is coNP- and coW[1]-hard. Addressing a problem posed by Berkholz (2012), we show coNP-hardness by establishing that deciding indistinguishability under the k-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm is coNP-hard when k is part of the input

Weisfeiler--Leman and Graph Spectra

We devise a hierarchy of spectral graph invariants, generalising the adjacency spectra and Laplacian spectra, which are commensurate in power with the hierarchy of combinatorial graph invariants generated by the Weisfeiler--Leman (WL) algorithm. More precisely, we provide a spectral characterisation of $k$-WL indistinguishability after $d$ iterations, for $k,d \in \mathbb{N}$. Most of the well-known spectral graph invariants such as adjacency or Laplacian spectra lie in the regime between 1-WL and 2-WL. We show that individualising one vertex plus running 1-WL is already more powerful than all such spectral invariants in terms of their ability to distinguish non-isomorphic graphs. Building on this result, we resolve an open problem of F\"urer (2010) about spectral invariants and strengthen a result due to Godsil (1981) about commute distances

Lasserre Hierarchy for Graph Isomorphism and Homomorphism Indistinguishability

We show that feasibility of the t^th level of the Lasserre semidefinite programming hierarchy for graph isomorphism can be expressed as a homomorphism indistinguishability relation. In other words, we define a class ?_t of graphs such that graphs G and H are not distinguished by the t^th level of the Lasserre hierarchy if and only if they admit the same number of homomorphisms from any graph in ?_t. By analysing the treewidth of graphs in ?_t we prove that the 3t^th level of Sherali-Adams linear programming hierarchy is as strong as the t^th level of Lasserre. Moreover, we show that this is best possible in the sense that 3t cannot be lowered to 3t-1 for any t. The same result holds for the Lasserre hierarchy with non-negativity constraints, which we similarly characterise in terms of homomorphism indistinguishability over a family ?_t^+ of graphs. Additionally, we give characterisations of level-t Lasserre with non-negativity constraints in terms of logical equivalence and via a graph colouring algorithm akin to the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm. This provides a polynomial time algorithm for determining if two given graphs are distinguished by the t^th level of the Lasserre hierarchy with non-negativity constraints

Limitations of Game Comonads via Homomorphism Indistinguishability

Abramsky, Dawar, and Wang (2017) introduced the pebbling comonad for k-variable counting logic and thereby initiated a line of work that imports category theoretic machinery to finite model theory. Such game comonads have been developed for various logics, yielding characterisations of logical equivalences in terms of isomorphisms in the associated co-Kleisli category. We show a first limitation of this approach by studying linear-algebraic logic, which is strictly more expressive than first-order counting logic and whose k-variable logical equivalence relations are known as invertible-map equivalences (IM). We show that there exists no finite-rank comonad on the category of graphs whose co-Kleisli isomorphisms characterise IM-equivalence, answering a question of \'O Conghaile and Dawar (CSL 2021). We obtain this result by ruling out a characterisation of IM-equivalence in terms of homomorphism indistinguishability and employing the Lov\'asz-type theorems for game comonads established by Dawar, Jakl, and Reggio (2021). Two graphs are homomorphism indistinguishable over a graph class if they admit the same number of homomorphisms from every graph in the class. The IM-equivalences cannot be characterised in this way, neither when counting homomorphisms in the natural numbers, nor in any finite prime field.Comment: Minor corrections in Section

Limitations of Game Comonads for Invertible-Map Equivalence via Homomorphism Indistinguishability

Abramsky, Dawar, and Wang (2017) introduced the pebbling comonad for k-variable counting logic and thereby initiated a line of work that imports category theoretic machinery to finite model theory. Such game comonads have been developed for various logics, yielding characterisations of logical equivalences in terms of isomorphisms in the associated co-Kleisli category. We show a first limitation of this approach by studying linear-algebraic logic, which is strictly more expressive than first-order counting logic and whose k-variable logical equivalence relations are known as invertible-map equivalences (IM). We show that there exists no finite-rank comonad on the category of graphs whose co-Kleisli isomorphisms characterise IM-equivalence, answering a question of Ó Conghaile and Dawar (CSL 2021). We obtain this result by ruling out a characterisation of IM-equivalence in terms of homomorphism indistinguishability and employing the Lovász-type theorem for game comonads established by Reggio (2022). Two graphs are homomorphism indistinguishable over a graph class if they admit the same number of homomorphisms from every graph in the class. The IM-equivalences cannot be characterised in this way, neither when counting homomorphisms in the natural numbers, nor in any finite prime field

Homomorphism Tensors and Linear Equations

Lov\'asz (1967) showed that two graphs $G$ and $H$ are isomorphic if and only if they are homomorphism indistinguishable over the class of all graphs, i.e. for every graph $F$, the number of homomorphisms from $F$ to $G$ equals the number of homomorphisms from $F$ to $H$. Recently, homomorphism indistinguishability over restricted classes of graphs such as bounded treewidth, bounded treedepth and planar graphs, has emerged as a surprisingly powerful framework for capturing diverse equivalence relations on graphs arising from logical equivalence and algebraic equation systems. In this paper, we provide a unified algebraic framework for such results by examining the linear-algebraic and representation-theoretic structure of tensors counting homomorphisms from labelled graphs. The existence of certain linear transformations between such homomorphism tensor subspaces can be interpreted both as homomorphism indistinguishability over a graph class and as feasibility of an equational system. Following this framework, we obtain characterisations of homomorphism indistinguishability over two natural graph classes, namely trees of bounded degree and graphs of bounded pathwidth, answering a question of Dell et al. (2018).Comment: 33 pages, accepted for ICALP 202

Going Deep and Going Wide: Counting Logic and Homomorphism Indistinguishability over Graphs of Bounded Treedepth and Treewidth

We study the expressive power of first-order logic with counting quantifiers, especially the k-variable and quantifier-rank-q fragment ^k_q, using homomorphism indistinguishability. Recently, Dawar, Jakl, and Reggio (2021) proved that two graphs satisfy the same ^k_q-sentences if and only if they are homomorphism indistinguishable over the class ^k_q of graphs admitting a k-pebble forest cover of depth q. Their proof builds on the categorical framework of game comonads developed by Abramsky, Dawar, and Wang (2017). We reprove their result using elementary techniques inspired by Dvořák (2010). Using these techniques we also give a characterisation of guarded counting logic. Our main focus, however, is to provide a graph theoretic analysis of the graph class ^k_q. This allows us to separate ^k_q from the intersection of the graph class TW_{k-1}, that is graphs of treewidth less or equal k-1, and TD_q, that is graphs of treedepth at most q if q is sufficiently larger than k. We are able to lift this separation to the semantic separation of the respective homomorphism indistinguishability relations. A part of this separation is to prove that the class TD_q is homomorphism distinguishing closed, which was already conjectured by Roberson (2022)

NPA Hierarchy for Quantum Isomorphism and Homomorphism Indistinguishability

Man\v{c}inska and Roberson~[FOCS'20] showed that two graphs are quantum isomorphic if and only if they are homomorphism indistinguishable over the class of planar graphs. Atserias et al.~[JCTB'19] proved that quantum isomorphism is undecidable in general. The NPA hierarchy gives a sequence of semidefinite programming relaxations of quantum isomorphism. Recently, Roberson and Seppelt~[ICALP'23] obtained a homomorphism indistinguishability characterization of the feasibility of each level of the Lasserre hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations of graph isomorphism. We prove a quantum analogue of this result by showing that each level of the NPA hierarchy of SDP relaxations for quantum isomorphism of graphs is equivalent to homomorphism indistinguishability over an appropriate class of planar graphs. By combining the convergence of the NPA hierarchy with the fact that the union of these graph classes is the set of all planar graphs, we are able to give a new proof of the result of Man\v{c}inska and Roberson~[FOCS'20] that avoids the use of the theory of quantum groups. This homomorphism indistinguishability characterization also allows us to give a randomized polynomial-time algorithm deciding exact feasibility of each fixed level of the NPA hierarchy of SDP relaxations for quantum isomorphism.Comment: 34 Pages, 5 Figure

The Complexity of Homomorphism Reconstructibility

Representing graphs by their homomorphism counts has led to the beautiful theory of homomorphism indistinguishability in recent years. Moreover, homomorphism counts have promising applications in database theory and machine learning, where one would like to answer queries or classify graphs solely based on the representation of a graph G as a finite vector of homomorphism counts from some fixed finite set of graphs to G. We study the computational complexity of the arguably most fundamental computational problem associated to these representations, the homomorphism reconstructability problem: given a finite sequence of graphs and a corresponding vector of natural numbers, decide whether there exists a graph G that realises the given vector as the homomorphism counts from the given graphs. We show that this problem yields a natural example of an NP^#-hard problem, which still can be NP-hard when restricted to a fixed number of input graphs of bounded treewidth and a fixed input vector of natural numbers, or alternatively, when restricted to a finite input set of graphs. We further show that, when restricted to a finite input set of graphs and given an upper bound on the order of the graph G as additional input, the problem cannot be NP-hard unless = NP. For this regime, we obtain partial positive results. We also investigate the problem’s parameterised complexity and provide fpt-algorithms for the case that a single graph is given and that multiple graphs of the same order with subgraph instead of homomorphism counts are given