English

The Complexity of Homomorphism Reconstruction Revisited

Discrete Mathematics 2026-02-20 v2 Data Structures and Algorithms Combinatorics

Abstract

We revisit the algorithmic problem of reconstructing a graph from homomorphism counts that has first been studied in (B\"oker et al., STACS 2024): given graphs F1,,FkF_1,\ldots,F_k and counts m1,,mkm_1,\ldots,m_k, decide if there is a graph GG such that the number of homomorphisms from FiF_i to GG is mim_i, for all ii. We prove that the problem is NEXP-hard if the counts mim_i are specified in binary and Σ2p\Sigma_2^p-complete if they are in unary. Furthermore, as a positive result, we show that the unary version can be solved in polynomial time if the constraint graphs are stars of bounded size.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.12780,
  title  = {The Complexity of Homomorphism Reconstruction Revisited},
  author = {Timo Gervens and Martin Grohe and Louis Härtel and Philipp da Silva Fonseca},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.12780},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Full version of a paper accepted at STACS 2026