English

Note on "The Complexity of Counting Surjective Homomorphisms and Compactions"

Computational Complexity 2017-10-05 v1

Abstract

Focke, Goldberg, and \v{Z}ivn\'y (arXiv 2017) prove a complexity dichotomy for the problem of counting surjective homomorphisms from a large input graph G without loops to a fixed graph H that may have loops. In this note, we give a short proof of a weaker result: Namely, we only prove the #P-hardness of the more general problem in which G may have loops. Our proof is an application of a powerful framework of Lov\'asz (2012), and it is analogous to proofs of Curticapean, Dell, and Marx (STOC 2017) who studied the "dual" problem in which the pattern graph G is small and the host graph H is the input. Independently, Chen (arXiv 2017) used Lov\'asz's framework to prove a complexity dichotomy for counting surjective homomorphisms to fixed finite structures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.01712,
  title  = {Note on "The Complexity of Counting Surjective Homomorphisms and Compactions"},
  author = {Holger Dell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.01712},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:03:49.729Z