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The Holant theorem is a powerful tool for studying the computational complexity of counting problems. Due to the great expressiveness of the Holant framework, a converse to the Holant theorem would itself be a very powerful counting indistinguishability theorem. The most general converse does not hold, but we prove the following, still highly general, version: if any two sets of real-valued signatures are Holant-indistinguishable, then they are equivalent up to an orthogonal transformation. This resolves a partially open conjecture of Xia (2010). Consequences of this theorem include the well-known result that homomorphism counts from all graphs determine a graph up to isomorphism, the classical sufficient condition for simultaneous orthogonal similarity of sets of real matrices, and a combinatorial characterization of sets of simultaneosly orthogonally decomposable (odeco) symmetric tensors.
@InProceedings{young:LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.136,
author = {Young, Ben},
title = {{The Converse of the Real Orthogonal Holant Theorem}},
booktitle = {52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025)},
pages = {136:1--136:20},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-372-0},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2025},
volume = {334},
editor = {Censor-Hillel, Keren and Grandoni, Fabrizio and Ouaknine, Jo\"{e}l and Puppis, Gabriele},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.136},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-235138},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.136},
annote = {Keywords: Holant, Counting Indistinguishability, Odeco}
}