Dichotomy for Graph Homomorphisms with Complex Values on Bounded Degree Graphs

Abstract: The complexity of graph homomorphisms has been a subject of intense study [11, 12, 4, 42, 21, 17, 6, 20]. The partition function $Z_{\mathbf A}(\cdot)$ of graph homomorphism is defined by a symmetric matrix $\mathbf A$ over $\mathbb C$. We prove that the complexity dichotomy of [6] extends to bounded degree graphs. More precisely, we prove that either $G \mapsto Z_{\mathbf A}(G)$ is computable in polynomial-time for every $G$, or for some $\Delta > 0$ it is #P-hard over (simple) graphs $G$ with maximum degree $\Delta(G) \le \Delta$. The tractability criterion on $\mathbf A$ for this dichotomy is explicit, and can be decided in polynomial-time in the size of $\mathbf A$. We also show that the dichotomy is effective in that either a P-time algorithm for, or a reduction from #SAT to, $Z_{\mathbf A}(\cdot)$ can be constructed from $\mathbf A$, in the respective cases.