Student Probability and Mathematical Physics Seminar

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Common Induced Subgraphs in Random Graphs

Speaker: Gabe Schoenbach, University of Chicago

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 201

Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 12:30 p.m.

Synopsis:

We study the problem of efficiently finding large common induced subgraphs of two independent Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi random graphs $G_1, G_2 \sim \mathbb{G}(n,1/2)$. Recently, Chatterjee and Diaconis~\cite{CD23} showed that the largest common induced subgraph of $G_1$ and $G_2$ has size $(4-o(1))\log_2 n$ with high probability. We first show that a simple greedy online algorithm finds a common induced subgraph of $G_1$ and $G_2$ of size $(2-o(1)) \log_2 n$ with high probability. Our main result shows that no online algorithm can find a common induced subgraph of $G_1$ and $G_2$ of size at least $(2+\varepsilon) \log_2 n$ with probability bounded away from $0$ as $n \to \infty$. Together, these results provide evidence that this problem exhibits a computation-to-optimization gap. To prove the impossibility result, we show that the solution space of the problem exhibits a version of the (multi) overlap gap property (OGP), and utilize an interpolation argument recently developed by Gamarnik, K{\i}z{\i}lda\u{g}, and Warnke~\cite{GKW25} that connects OGP and online algorithms.