Parameterised Holant Problems

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive complexity classification of parameterised Holant problems, revealing a clear dichotomy and a surprising gap in their computational complexity landscape.

Contribution

It establishes an exhaustive trichotomy for parameterised Holant problems based on signature sets, and classifies the uncoloured version, highlighting new complexity boundaries.

Findings

Every FPT instance is solvable in matrix multiplication time.

The problem instances are either FPT-near-linear or #W[1]-complete.

A complete classification for uncoloured Holant problems is provided.

Abstract

We investigate the complexity of parameterised holant problems p-$\mathrm{Holant}(\mathcal{S})$ for families of signatures $\mathcal{S}$. The parameterised holant framework was introduced by Curticapean in 2015 as a counter-part to the classical theory of holographic reductions and algorithms and it constitutes an extensive family of coloured and weighted counting constraint satisfaction problems on graph-like structures, encoding as special cases various well-studied counting problems in parameterised and fine-grained complexity theory such as counting edge-colourful $k$-matchings, graph-factors, Eulerian orientations or, subgraphs with weighted degree constraints. We establish an exhaustive complexity trichotomy along the set of signatures $\mathcal{S}$: Depending on $\mathcal{S}$, p-$\mathrm{Holant}(\mathcal{S})$ is: (1) solvable in FPT-near-linear time (i.e. $f(k)\cdot \tilde{\mathcal{O}}(|x|)$); (2) solvable in "FPT-matrix-multiplication time" (i.e. $f(k)\cdot {\mathcal{O}}(n^{\omega})$) but not solvable in FPT-near-linear time unless the Triangle Conjecture fails; or (3) #W[1]-complete and no significant improvement over brute force is possible unless ETH fails. This classification reveals a significant and surprising gap in the complexity landscape of parameterised Holants: Not only is every instance either fixed-parameter tractable or #W[1]-complete, but additionally, every FPT instance is solvable in time $f(k)\cdot {\mathcal{O}}(n^{\omega})$. We also establish a complete classification for a natural uncoloured version of parameterised holant problem p-$\mathrm{UnColHolant}(\mathcal{S})$, which encodes as special cases the non-coloured analogues of the aforementioned examples. We show that the complexity of p-$\mathrm{UnColHolant}(\mathcal{S})$ is different: Depending on $\mathcal{S}$ all instances are either solvable in FPT-near-linear time, or #W[1]-complete.