Spectral Sidorenko inequalities and edge-spectral supersaturation
Abstract
We develop a spectral approach to Sidorenko-type inequalities and apply it to establish sharp edge-spectral supersaturation results. Let be a bipartite graph with vertices and edges, where , and write . We prove that Sidorenko's conjecture is equivalent to a spectral strengthening: 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 be the split graph with edges obtained by joining a clique with an independent set. For any -edge graph with , \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