Wasserstein distances between ERGMs and Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi models

Abstract

Ferromagnetic exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are random graph models under which the presence of certain small structures (such as triangles) is encouraged; they can be constructed by tilting an Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi model by the exponential of a particular nonlinear Hamiltonian. These models are mixtures of metastable wells which each behave macroscopically like an Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi model, exhibiting the same laws of large numbers for subgraph counts [CD13]. However, on the microscopic scale these metastable wells are very different from Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi models, with the total variation distance between the two measures tending to 1 [MX23]. In this article we clarify this situation by providing a sharp (up to constants) bound on the Hamming-Wasserstein distance between the two models, which is the average number of edges at which they differ, under the coupling which minimizes this average. In particular, we show that this distance is $\Theta(n^{3/2})$, quantifying exactly how these models differ. An upper bound of this form has appeared in the past [RR19], but this was restricted to the subcritical (high-temperature) regime of parameters. We extend this bound, using a new proof technique, to the supercritical (low-temperature) regime, and prove a matching lower bound which has only previously appeared in the subcritical regime of special cases of ERGMs satisfying a "triangle-free" condition [DF25]. To prove the lower bound in the presence of triangles, we introduce an approximation of the discrete derivative of the Hamiltonian, which controls the dynamical properties of the ERGM, in terms of local counts of triangles and wedges (two-stars) near an edge. This approximation is the main technical and conceptual contribution of the article, and we expect it will be useful in a variety of other contexts as well. Along the way, we also prove a bound on the marginal edge probability under the ERGM via a new bootstrapping argument. Such a bound has already appeared [FLSW25], but again only in the subcritical regime and using a different proof strategy.