Homomorphism Indistinguishability, Multiplicity Automata Equivalence, and Polynomial Identity Testing

Abstract: Two graphs $G$ and $H$ are homomorphism indistinguishable over a graph class $\mathcal{F}$ if they admit the same number of homomorphisms from every graph $F \in \mathcal{F}$. Many graph isomorphism relaxations such as (quantum) isomorphism and cospectrality can be characterised as homomorphism indistinguishability over specific graph classes. Thereby, the problems $\textrm{HomInd}(\mathcal{F})$ of deciding homomorphism indistinguishability over $\mathcal{F}$ subsume diverse graph isomorphism relaxations whose complexities range from logspace to undecidable. Establishing the first general result on the complexity of $\textrm{HomInd}(\mathcal{F})$, Seppelt (MFCS 2024) showed that $\textrm{HomInd}(\mathcal{F})$ is in randomised polynomial time for every graph class $\mathcal{F}$ of bounded treewidth that can be defined in counting monadic second-order logic $\mathsf{CMSO}2$. We show that this algorithm is conditionally optimal, i.e. it cannot be derandomised unless polynomial identity testing is in $\mathsf{PTIME}$. For $\mathsf{CMSO}_2$-definable graph classes $\mathcal{F}$ of bounded pathwidth, we improve the previous complexity upper bound for $\textrm{HomInd}(\mathcal{F})$ from $\mathsf{PTIME}$ to $\mathsf{C}=\mathsf{L}$ and show that this is tight. Secondarily, we establish a connection between homomorphism indistinguishability and multiplicity automata equivalence which allows us to pinpoint the complexity of the latter problem as $\mathsf{C}_=\mathsf{L}$-complete.