English

Spectral Sidorenko inequalities and edge-spectral supersaturation

Combinatorics 2026-05-27 v1

Abstract

We develop a spectral approach to Sidorenko-type inequalities and apply it to establish sharp edge-spectral supersaturation results. Let HH be a bipartite graph with vv vertices and ee edges, where vev\le e, and write M(G)=2e(G)M(G)=2e(G). We prove that Sidorenko's conjecture is equivalent to a spectral strengthening: hom(H,G)M(G)eV(G)v2e if and only if hom(H,G)λ(G)2evM(G)ve. \hom(H,G)\ge M(G)^e |V(G)|^{v-2e} \quad \text{ if and only if }\quad \hom(H,G)\ge \lambda(G)^{2e-v}M(G)^{v-e}. We also introduce an operator-norm certificate which, via the Riesz--Thorin interpolation, gives direct proofs of the spectral Sidorenko inequality in several cases. The converse direction in the equivalence theorem is proved by a tensor-power spectral regularization lemma. As an application, we obtain sharp asymptotic edge-spectral supersaturation results for complete bipartite graphs and even cycles. Let St1,mS_{t-1,m} be the split graph with mm edges obtained by joining a clique Kt1K_{t-1} with an independent set. For any mm-edge graph GG with λ(G)>λ(St1,m)\lambda(G)>\lambda(S_{t-1,m}), \texttt{#} K_{t,t}(G) \ge \Big(\frac{2^{-(t-1)^2}}{(t!)^2}-o(1)\Big)m^t \quad \text{and}\quad \texttt{#}C_{2t}(G) \ge \Big(\frac{(t-1)!}{2t^t}-o(1)\Big)m^t. Both constants are best possible: the first is attained asymptotically by random graphs, while the second is attained by split graphs. The supersaturation proofs combine spectral Sidorenko inequalities with heavy-edge pruning process, a Perron-vector localized/delocalized dichotomy, and incidence-matrix inequalities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.26614,
  title  = {Spectral Sidorenko inequalities and edge-spectral supersaturation},
  author = {Yongtao Li and Wilson Lin and Hong Liu and Shengtong Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26614},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

32 pages. Any comments and suggestions are welcome