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Improvement on the Erd\H{o}s-Kleitman conjecture via the KKL theorem

Combinatorics 2026-03-20 v1

Abstract

In 1974, Erd\H{o}s and Kleitman conjectured that if a family F2[n]\mathcal{F}\subseteq 2^{[n]} contains no matching of size ss and is maximal with respect to this property, then F(12(s1))2n. |\mathcal{F}|\ge \left(1-2^{-(s-1)}\right)\cdot 2^{n}. For decades, the best general lower bound remained the trivial 2n12^{n-1}. About a decade ago, Frankl and Tokushige emphasized that obtaining a bound of the form (12+ε)2n\left(\frac{1}{2}+\varepsilon\right)\cdot 2^n for some ε>0\varepsilon>0 is a challenging problem. A breakthrough of Buci\v{c}, Letzter, Sudakov and Tran in 2018 showed that F(11s)2n |\mathcal{F}|\ge \left(1-\frac{1}{s}\right)\cdot 2^n via two very elegant and quite different approaches. Our main result shows that F(11s+(s2)logn25n)2n |\mathcal{F}|\ge \left( 1 - \frac{1}{s + (s-2)\frac{\log n}{2\sqrt{5}n}} \right)\cdot 2^n by exploiting a connection to the cornerstone result of Kahn, Kalai and Linial on influences of Boolean functions. Independently, we can also obtain a weaker improvement combining the linear algebra method with a combinatorial twist.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.18948,
  title  = {Improvement on the Erd\H{o}s-Kleitman conjecture via the KKL theorem},
  author = {Gennian Ge and Jialuo Wang and Zixiang Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.18948},
  year   = {2026}
}

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15 pages