On the coefficients of interior and exterior polynomials of polymatroids
Abstract
The Tutte polynomial is an important invariant of graphs and matroids. Chen and Guo \emph{[Adv. in Appl. Math. 166 (2025) 102868.]} proved that for a -edge connected graph and for any with , where , is the set of all minimal edge cuts with edges, is the Tutte polynomial of the graph , and denotes the coefficient of in the polynomial . Recently, Ma, Guan and Jin \emph{[arXiv.2503.06095, 2025.]} generalized this result from graphs to matroids and obtained the dual result on coefficients of of matroids at the same time. In 2013, as a generalization of and of graphs to hypergraphs, K\'{a}lm\'{a}n \emph{[Adv. Math. 244 (2013) 823-873.]} introduced interior and exterior polynomials for connected hypergraphs. Chen and Guo posed a problem that can one generalize these results of graphs to interior and exterior polynomials of hypergraphs? In this paper, we solve it in the affirmative by obtaining results for more general polymatroids, which include the case of hypergraphs and also generalize the results of matroids due to Ma, Guan and Jin. As an application, the sequence consisting of these coefficients on polymatroids is proven to be unimodal, while the unimodality of the whole coefficients of matroids was obtained in 2018 by Adiprasito, Huh and Katz using Hodge theory.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.22142,
title = {On the coefficients of interior and exterior polynomials of polymatroids},
author = {Xiaxia Guan and Xian'an Jin and Tianlong Ma and Weihua Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.22142},
year = {2025}
}