An AI enhanced approach to the tree unimodality conjecture

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ramos, Eric, Sun, Sunny
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ramos, Eric
Sun, Sunny
author_facet Ramos, Eric
Sun, Sunny
contents Given a graph $G$, its independence sequence is the integral sequence $a_1,a_2,...,a_n$, where $a_i$ is the number of independent sets of vertices of size i. In the late 80's Alavi, Erdos, Malde, Schwenk showed that this sequence need not be unimodal for general graphs, but conjectured that it is always unimodal whenever $G$ is a tree. This conjecture was then naturally generalized to claim that the independence sequence of trees should be log concave, in the sense that $a_i^2$ is always above $a_{i-1}a_{i+1}$. This conjecture stood for many years, until in 2023, Kadrawi, Levit, Yosef, and Mizrachi proved that there were exactly two trees on 26 vertices whose independence sequence was not log concave. In this paper, we use the AI architecture PatternBoost, developed by Charton, Ellenberg, Wagner, and Williamson to train a machine to find counter-examples to the log-concavity conjecture. We will discuss the successes of this approach - finding tens of thousands of new counter-examples to log-concavity with vertex set sizes varying from 27 to 101 - and some of its fascinating failures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18826
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An AI enhanced approach to the tree unimodality conjecture
Ramos, Eric
Sun, Sunny
Combinatorics
Artificial Intelligence
Discrete Mathematics
Machine Learning
Given a graph $G$, its independence sequence is the integral sequence $a_1,a_2,...,a_n$, where $a_i$ is the number of independent sets of vertices of size i. In the late 80's Alavi, Erdos, Malde, Schwenk showed that this sequence need not be unimodal for general graphs, but conjectured that it is always unimodal whenever $G$ is a tree. This conjecture was then naturally generalized to claim that the independence sequence of trees should be log concave, in the sense that $a_i^2$ is always above $a_{i-1}a_{i+1}$. This conjecture stood for many years, until in 2023, Kadrawi, Levit, Yosef, and Mizrachi proved that there were exactly two trees on 26 vertices whose independence sequence was not log concave. In this paper, we use the AI architecture PatternBoost, developed by Charton, Ellenberg, Wagner, and Williamson to train a machine to find counter-examples to the log-concavity conjecture. We will discuss the successes of this approach - finding tens of thousands of new counter-examples to log-concavity with vertex set sizes varying from 27 to 101 - and some of its fascinating failures.
title An AI enhanced approach to the tree unimodality conjecture
topic Combinatorics
Artificial Intelligence
Discrete Mathematics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18826