Nearly Optimal Independence Oracle Algorithms for Edge Estimation in Hypergraphs

Consider a query model of computation in which an n-vertex k-hypergraph can be accessed only via its independence oracle or via its colourful independence oracle, and each oracle query may incur a cost depending on the size of the query. Several recent results (Dell and Lapinskas, STOC 2018; Dell, Lapinskas, and Meeks, SODA 2020) give efficient algorithms to approximately count the hypergraph’s edges in the colourful setting. These algorithms immediately imply fine-grained reductions from approximate counting to decision, with overhead only log^Θ(k) n over the running time n^α of the original decision algorithm, for many well-studied problems including k-Orthogonal Vectors, k-SUM, subgraph isomorphism problems including k-Clique and colourful-H, graph motifs, and k-variable first-order model checking. We explore the limits of what is achievable in this setting, obtaining unconditional lower bounds on the oracle cost of algorithms to approximately count the hypergraph’s edges in both the colourful and uncoloured settings. In both settings, we also obtain algorithms which essentially match these lower bounds; in the colourful setting, this requires significant changes to the algorithm of Dell, Lapinskas, and Meeks (SODA 2020) and reduces the total overhead to log^{Θ(k-α)}n. Our lower bound for the uncoloured setting shows that there is no fine-grained reduction from approximate counting to the corresponding uncoloured decision problem (except in the case α ≥ k-1): without an algorithm for the colourful decision problem, we cannot hope to avoid the much larger overhead of roughly n^{(k-α)²/4}. The uncoloured setting has previously been studied for the special case k = 2 (Peled, Ramamoorthy, Rashtchian, Sinha, ITCS 2018; Chen, Levi, and Waingarten, SODA 2020), and our work generalises the existing algorithms and lower bounds for this special case to k > 2 and to oracles with cost.