arXiv subjects

Peter Allen

Publications and source records attributed to Peter Allen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Making spanning graphs

We prove that for each $D\ge 2$ there exists $c>0$ such that whenever $b\le c\big(\tfrac{n}{\log n}\big)^{1/D}$, in the $(1:b)$ Maker-Breaker game played on $E(K_n)$, Maker has a strategy to guarantee claiming a graph $G$ containing copies of all graphs $H$ with $v(H)\le n$ and $Δ(H)\le D$. We show further that the graph $G$ guaranteed by this strategy also contains copies of any graph $H$ with bounded maximum degree and degeneracy at most $\tfrac{D-1}{2}$. This lower bound on the threshold bias is sharp up to the $\log$-factor when $H$ consists of $\tfrac{n}{3}$ vertex-disjoint triangles or $\tfrac{n}{4}$ vertex-disjoint $K_4$-copies.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

Partition universality for graphs of bounded degeneracy and degree

We prove asymptotically optimal bounds on the number of edges a graph $G$ must have in order that any $r$-colouring of $E(G)$ has a colour class which contains every $D$-degenerate graph on $n$ vertices with bounded maximum degree. We also improve the upper bounds on the number of edges $G$ must have in order that any $r$-colouring of $E(G)$ has a colour class which contains every $n$-vertex graph with maximum degree $Δ$, for each $Δ\ge 4$. In both cases, we show that a binomial random graph with $Cn$ vertices and a suitable edge probability is likely to provide the desired $G$.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

Local Resilience for Containment of Bounded Degree Spanning Subgraphs

We prove that for all $Δ\geq 2$ and $γ> 0$, there exists a constant $C = C(Δ, γ)$ such that for $p\geq C(\log n/n)^{1/Δ}$, asymptotically almost surely, every spanning subgraph $G$ of $G(n,p)$ with minimum degree at least $(1-1/(2Δ)+γ)pn$ contains every $n$-vertex graph $H$ with maximum degree at most $Δ$ and with at least $Cp^{-2}$ vertices not in any triangles of $H$. This is a 'sparse local resilience version' of a classical theorem of Sauer and Spencer. The condition that $H$ should contain some vertices not in triangles is necessary, and in fact, the quantity $p^{-2}$ is asymptotically best possible. A key feature of our result is that $H$ is allowed to be an expander graph, distinguishing it from previous results of similar nature, which dealt with, e.g., graphs of sublinear bandwidth. Our proof makes use of regularity arguments, with the sparse blow-up lemma for random graphs being a key tool.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

The tree packing conjecture for trees of almost linear maximum degree

We prove that there is $c>0$ such that for all sufficiently large $n$, if $T_1,\dots,T_n$ are any trees such that $T_i$ has $i$ vertices and maximum degree at most $cn/\log n$, then $\{T_1,\dots,T_n\}$ packs into $K_n$. Our main result actually allows to replace the host graph $K_n$ by an arbitrary quasirandom graph, and to generalize from trees to graphs of bounded degeneracy that are rich in bare paths, contain some odd degree vertices, and only satisfy much less stringent restrictions on their number of vertices.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

Sharp bounds for the fractional chromatic number of high-girth $d$-degenerate graphs

Martinsson and Steiner recently proved that the fractional chromatic number of any $d$-degenerate triangle-free graph $G$ satisfies $χ_f(G) = O\left(\frac{d}{\log d}\right)$. They further conjectured a sharp leading constant $1 + o(1)$. In this paper, we confirm their upper bound conjecture for graphs having girth at least $5$. Our proof is constructive: it gives an efficient randomized algorithm that, with high probability, computes a fractional coloring of weight at most $(1 + o(1))\frac{d}{\log d}$ in such graphs. Furthermore, we establish their conjectured lower bound in a stronger form: for any constant $g \ge 4$, there exist $d$-degenerate graphs having girth at least $g$ with $χ_f(G) \ge (1 - o(1))\frac{d}{\log d}$. This lower bound is achieved by analyzing a random graph based on the uniform attachment model. Notably, our results reveal that this model lacks the typical computational complexity barriers found in Erdős-Rényi graphs, where there is a conjectured factor-$2$ algorithmic gap for this problem.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

A generalised transference principle

The last two decades have witnessed a growing trend towards proving sparse random analogues of combinatorial theorems. One unified approach to proving such theorems, formalised by Conlon and Gowers [Ann. of Math. 2016], involves establishing a 'transference principle' which allows one to translate between robust properties in the dense setting and the sparse $p$-random setting, provided $p$ is not too small. Our results provide a more general transference theorem, extending the results of Conlon and Gowers and also those of Schacht [Ann. of Math. 2016]. Among a variety of other applications, we use this to obtain a sparse counting lemma for graphs and hypergraphs which are not necessarily strictly balanced. Our method achieves asymptotically optimal bounds on the probability $p$, and the probability of success.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

Breaking the Bollobás-Eldridge-Catlin Barrier for Bipartite Graphs

The celebrated Bollobás-Eldridge-Catlin packing conjecture states that every $n$-vertex graph $G$ with minimum degree at least $\big(1-\frac{1}{Δ+1}\big) n$ contains every $n$-vertex graph $H$ of maximum degree at most $Δ$. Despite considerable attention, the conjecture remains widely open. We show that for bipartite $H$ this threshold can be greatly improved: there is an absolute constant $c>0$ such that every $n$-vertex graph $G$ with minimum degree at least $ \big(1-c\frac{\logΔ}Δ\big)n $ contains every $n$-vertex bipartite graph $H$ of maximum degree at most $Δ$, provided $Δ$ is not too large compared to $n$. Moreover, we prove that this logarithmic improvement is best possible up to the value of the constant.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

A robust Corrádi--Hajnal Theorem

For a graph $G$ and $p\in[0,1]$, we denote by $G_p$ the random sparsification of $G$ obtained by keeping each edge of $G$ independently, with probability $p$. We show that there exists a $C>0$ such that if $p\geq C(\log n)^{1/3}n^{-2/3}$ and $G$ is an $n$-vertex graph with $n\in 3\mathbb{N}$ and $δ(G)\geq \tfrac{2n}{3}$, then with high probability $G_p$ contains a triangle factor. Both the minimum degree condition and the probability condition, up to the choice of $C$, are tight. Our result can be viewed as a common strengthening of the seminal theorems of Corrádi and Hajnal, which deals with the extremal minimum degree condition for containing triangle factors (corresponding to $p=1$ in our result), and Johansson, Kahn and Vu, which deals with the threshold for the appearance of a triangle factor in $G(n,p)$ (corresponding to $G=K_n$ in our result). It also implies a lower bound on the number of triangle factors in graphs with minimum degree at least $\tfrac{2n}{3}$ which gets close to the truth.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

On Ramsey-type problems for paths and cycles with few colour changes

In 1967, Gerencser and Gyárfás determined the exact values of the two-colour Ramsey numbers of paths. In a footnote, they made the following observation: Every $2$-edge-coloured complete graph contains a Hamilton path with at most one colour change. Later, this led to a challenging and still wide open conjecture about covering edge-coloured complete graphs with monochromatic paths. Inspired by the original statement, we study paths and cycles with few colour changes in $3$-edge-coloured complete graphs. For this, we introduce a new Ramsey-type parameter: For $q,k \in \mathbb{N}$ and a graph $G$, let $R_q^k(G)$ denote the smallest $N \in \mathbb{N}$ such that every $q$-edge-coloured complete graph on $N$ vertices contains a copy of $G$ with at most $k$ vertices that are incident to edges in $G$ of different colours. For paths, we show that $R_3^1(P_n) = \frac{3n}{2} + O(1)$, and for even cycles, we show that $R_3^2(C_n) = \frac{3n}{2} + o(n)$.

math.CO↗

arXiv2026

Ramsey numbers for 1-degenerate 3-graphs

We construct a 3-uniform 1-degenerate hypergraph on $n$ vertices whose 2-colour Ramsey number is $Ω\big(n^{3/2}/\log n\big)$. This shows that all remaining open cases of the hypergraph Burr-Erdős conjecture are false. Our graph is a variant of the celebrated hedgehog graph. We additionally show near-sharp upper bounds, proving that all 3-uniform generalised hedgehogs have 2-colour Ramsey number $O\big(n^{3/2}\big)$.

math.CO↗

arXiv2025

Bounds for Hypergraph Universality

A graph $Γ$ is said to be universal for a class of graphs $\mathcal{H}$ if $Γ$ contains a copy of every $H \in \mathcal{H}$ as a subgraph. The number of edges required for a host graph $Γ$ to be universal for the class of $D$-degenerate graphs on $n$ vertices has been shown to be $O(n^{2-1/D}(\log n)^{2/D}(\log\log n)^{5})$. We generalise this result to $r$-uniform hypergraphs, showing the following. Given $D, r \ge 2$ and $n$ sufficiently large, there exists a constant $C = C(D, r)$ such that there exists a graph with at most \[Cn^{r-1/D}(\log n)^{2/D}(\log\log n)^{2r+1}\] edges which is universal for the class of $D$-degenerate $r$-uniform hypergraphs on $n$ vertices. This is tight up to the polylogarithmic term.

math.CO↗

arXiv2025

Blow-up lemmas for sparse graphs

The blow-up lemma states that a system of super-regular pairs contains all bounded degree spanning graphs as subgraphs that embed into a corresponding system of complete pairs. This lemma has far-reaching applications in extremal combinatorics. We prove sparse analogues of the blow-up lemma for subgraphs of random and of pseudorandom graphs. Our main results are the following three sparse versions of the blow-up lemma: one for embedding spanning graphs with maximum degree $Δ$ in subgraphs of $G(n,p)$ with $p=C(\log n/n)^{1/Δ}$; one for embedding spanning graphs with maximum degree $Δ$ and degeneracy $D$ in subgraphs of $G(n,p)$ with $p=C_Δ\big(\log n/n\big)^{1/(2D+1)}$; and one for embedding spanning graphs with maximum degree $Δ$ in $(p,cp^{\max(4,(3Δ+1)/2)}n)$-bijumbled graphs. We also consider various applications of these lemmas.

math.CO↗

arXiv2025

Robustness of the Sauer-Spencer Theorem

We prove a robust version of a graph embedding theorem of Sauer and Spencer. To state this sparser analogue, we define $G(p)$ to be a random subgraph of $G$ obtained by retaining each edge of $G$ independently with probability $p \in [0,1]$, and let $m_1(H)$ be the maximum $1$-density of a graph $H$. We show that for any constant $Δ$ and $γ> 0$, if $G$ is an $n$-vertex host graph with minimum degree $δ(G) \geq (1 - 1/2Δ+ γ)n$ and $H$ is an $n$-vertex graph with maximum degree $Δ(H) \leq Δ$, then for $p \geq Cn^{-1/m_1(H)}\log n$, the random subgraph $G(p)$ contains a copy of $H$ with high probability. Our value for $p$ is optimal up to a log-factor. In fact, we prove this result for a more general minimum degree condition on $G$, by introducing an \emph{extension threshold} $δ_{\rm e}(Δ)$, such that the above result holds for graphs $G$ with ${δ(G) \geq (δ_{\rm e}(Δ) + γ)n}$. We show that $δ_{\rm e}(Δ) \leq (2Δ-1)/2Δ$, and further conjecture that $δ_{\rm e}(Δ)$ equals $Δ/(Δ+1)$, which matches the minimum degree condition on $G$ in the Bollobás-Eldridge-Catlin Conjecture. A main tool in our proof is a vertex-spread version of the blow-up lemma of Allen, Böttcher, Hàn, Kohayakawa, and Person, which we believe to be of independent interest.

math.CO↗

arXiv2023

Universality for graphs of bounded degeneracy

Given a family $\mathcal{H}$ of graphs, a graph $G$ is called $\mathcal{H}$-universal if $G$ contains every graph of $\mathcal{H}$ as a subgraph. Following the extensive research on universal graphs of small size for bounded-degree graphs, Alon asked what is the minimum number of edges that a graph must have to be universal for the class of all $n$-vertex graphs that are $D$-degenerate. In this paper, we answer this question up to a factor that is polylogarithmic in $n.$

math.CO↗

arXiv2023

Teleoperated Robot Grasping in Virtual Reality Spaces

Despite recent advancement in virtual reality technology, teleoperating a high DoF robot to complete dexterous tasks in cluttered scenes remains difficult. In this work, we propose a system that allows the user to teleoperate a Fetch robot to perform grasping in an easy and intuitive way, through exploiting the rich environment information provided by the virtual reality space. Our system has the benefit of easy transferability to different robots and different tasks, and can be used without any expert knowledge. We tested the system on a real fetch robot, and a video demonstrating the effectiveness of our system can be seen at https://youtu.be/1-xW2Bx_Cms.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

The Ramsey numbers of squares of paths and cycles

The square $G^2$ of a graph $G$ is the graph on $V(G)$ with a pair of vertices $uv$ an edge whenever $u$ and $v$ have distance $1$ or $2$ in $G$. Given graphs $G$ and $H$, the Ramsey number $R(G,H)$ is the minimum $N$ such that whenever the edges of the complete graph $K_N$ are coloured with red and blue, there exists either a red copy of $G$ or a blue copy of $H$. We prove that for all sufficiently large $n$ we have \[R(P_{3n}^2,P_{3n}^2)=R(P_{3n+1}^2,P_{3n+1}^2)=R(C_{3n}^2,C_{3n}^2)=9n-3\mbox{ and } R(P_{3n+2}^2,P_{3n+2}^2)=9n+1.\] We also show that for any $γ>0$ and $Δ$ there exists $β>0$ such that the following holds. If $G$ can be coloured with three colours such that all colour classes have size at most $n$, the maximum degree $Δ(G)$ of $G$ is at most $Δ$, and $G$ has bandwidth at most $βn$, then $R(G,G)\le (3+γ)n$.

math.CO↗

arXiv2022

Multiple View Performers for Shape Completion

We propose the Multiple View Performer (MVP) - a new architecture for 3D shape completion from a series of temporally sequential views. MVP accomplishes this task by using linear-attention Transformers called Performers. Our model allows the current observation of the scene to attend to the previous ones for more accurate infilling. The history of past observations is compressed via the compact associative memory approximating modern continuous Hopfield memory, but crucially of size independent from the history length. We compare our model with several baselines for shape completion over time, demonstrating the generalization gains that MVP provides. To the best of our knowledge, MVP is the first multiple view voxel reconstruction method that does not require registration of multiple depth views and the first causal Transformer based model for 3D shape completion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Packing degenerate graphs

Given $D$ and $γ>0$, whenever $c>0$ is sufficiently small and $n$ sufficiently large, if $\mathcal{G}$ is a family of $D$-degenerate graphs of individual orders at most $n$, maximum degrees at most $\tfrac{cn}{\log n}$, and total number of edges at most $(1-γ)\binom{n}{2}$, then $\mathcal{G}$ packs into the complete graph $K_{n}$. Our proof proceeds by analysing a natural random greedy packing algorithm. This version of the manuscript corrects a small error that appeared in the published version [Adv Math, 354 (2019), 106739].

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