Homomorphism Indistinguishability Relations induced by Quantum Groups
Abstract
Homomorphism indistinguishability is a way of characterising many natural equivalence relations on graphs. Two graphs and are called homomorphism indistinguishable over a graph class if for each , the number of homomorphisms from to equals the number of homomorphisms from to . Examples of such equivalence relations include isomorphism and cospectrality, as well as equivalence with respect to many formal logics. Quantum groups are a generalisation of topological groups that describe "non-commutative symmetries" and, inter alia, have applications in quantum information theory. An important subclass are the easy quantum groups, which enjoy a combinatorial characterisation and have been fully classified by Raum and Weber. A recent connection between these seemingly distant concepts was made by Man\v{c}inska and Roberson, who showed that quantum isomorphism, a relaxation of classical isomorphism that can be phrased in terms of the quantum symmetric group, is equivalent to homomorphism indistinguishability over the class of planar graphs. We generalise Man\v{c}inska and Roberson's result to all orthogonal easy quantum groups. We obtain for each orthogonal easy quantum group a graph isomorphism relaxation and a graph class , such that homomorphism indistinguishability over coincides with . Our results include a full classification of the -intertwiners of the graph-theoretic quantum group obtained by adding the adjacency matrix of a graph to the intertwiners of an orthogonal easy quantum group.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.07922,
title = {Homomorphism Indistinguishability Relations induced by Quantum Groups},
author = {Tim Seppelt and Gian Luca Spitzer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.07922},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Simplified Lemma 45, corrected typos in Theorem 60