Count-Free Weisfeiler--Leman and Group Isomorphism

TL;DR

This paper explores the limitations and capabilities of count-free Weisfeiler--Leman algorithms in testing group isomorphism, showing improvements in parallel complexity for certain group families and demonstrating the necessity of counting in some cases.

Contribution

It introduces new complexity bounds for group isomorphism problems using count-free algorithms and proves limitations of count-free pebble games in distinguishing Abelian groups.

Findings

Improved parallel algorithms for specific group families.

Count-free pebble game cannot distinguish Abelian groups.

Counting appears necessary for efficient group isomorphism testing.

Abstract

We investigate the power of counting in Group Isomorphism. We first leverage the count-free variant of the Weisfeiler--Leman Version I algorithm for groups (Brachter & Schweitzer, LICS 2020) in tandem with limited non-determinism and limited counting to improve the parallel complexity of isomorphism testing for several families of groups. These families include: - Direct products of non-Abelian simple groups. - Coprime extensions, where the normal Hall subgroup is Abelian and the complement is an $O(1)$-generated solvable group with solvability class $\text{poly} \log \log n$. This notably includes instances where the complement is an $O(1)$-generated nilpotent group. This problem was previously known to be in $\textsf{P}$ (Qiao, Sarma, & Tang, STACS 2011), and the complexity was recently improved to $\textsf{L}$ (Grochow & Levet, FCT 2023). - Graphical groups of class $2$ and exponent $p > 2$ (Mekler, J. Symb. Log., 1981) arising from the CFI and twisted CFI graphs (Cai, F\"urer, & Immerman, Combinatorica 1992) respectively. In particular, our work improves upon previous results of Brachter & Schweitzer (LICS 2020). We finally show that the $q$-ary count-free pebble game is unable to distinguish even Abelian groups. This extends the result of Grochow & Levet (ibid), who established the result in the case of $q = 1$. The general theme is that some counting appears necessary to place Group Isomorphism into $\textsf{P}$.