Coloring graphs with forbidden bipartite subgraphs

Abstract: A conjecture of Alon, Krivelevich, and Sudakov states that, for any graph $F$, there is a constant $c_F > 0$ such that if $G$ is an $F$-free graph of maximum degree $\Delta$, then $\chi(G) \leq c_F \Delta / \log\Delta$. Alon, Krivelevich, and Sudakov verified this conjecture for a class of graphs $F$ that includes all bipartite graphs. Moreover, it follows from recent work by Davies, Kang, Pirot, and Sereni that if $G$ is $K_{t,t}$-free, then $\chi(G) \leq (t + o(1)) \Delta / \log\Delta$ as $\Delta \to \infty$. We improve this bound to $(1+o(1)) \Delta/\log \Delta$, making the constant factor independent of $t$. We further extend our result to the DP-coloring setting (also known as correspondence coloring), introduced by Dvo\v{r}\'ak and Postle.