László Lovász

We generalize subgraph densities, arising in dense graph limit theory, to Markov spaces (symmetric measures on the square of a standard Borel space). More generally, we define an analogue of the set of homomorphisms in the form of a measure on maps of a finite graph into a Markov space. The existence of such homomorphism measures is not always guaranteed, but can be established under rather natural smoothness conditions on the Markov space and sparseness conditions on the graph. This continues a direction in graph limit theory in which such measures are viewed as limits of graph sequences.

In two recent papers by Veitch and Roy and by Borgs, Chayes, Cohn, and Holden, a new class of sparse random graph processes based on the concept of graphexes over $\sigma$-finite measure spaces has been introduced. In this paper, we introduce a metric for graphexes that generalizes the cut metric for the graphons of the dense theory of graph convergence. We show that a sequence of graphexes converges in this metric if and only if the sequence of graph processes generated by the graphexes converges in distribution. In the course of the proof, we establish a regularity lemma and determine which sets of graphexes are precompact under our metric. Finally, we establish an identifiability theorem, characterizing when two graphexes are equivalent in the sense that they lead to the same process of random graphs.

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 for the running time on the error parameter was known, and we improve it to a polynomial dependence. Third, we revisit the problem of finding an algorithmic regularity lemma, giving approximation algorithms for several co-NP-complete problems. We show how to use the weak Frieze–Kannan regularity lemma to approximate the regularity of a pair of vertex subsets. We also show how to quickly find, for each ε′>ε, an ε′-regular partition withkparts if there exists an ε-regular partition withkparts. Finally, we give a simple proof of the permutation regularity lemma which improves the tower-type bound on the number of parts in the previous proofs to a single exponential bound.