Fine-grained dichotomies for the Tutte plane and Boolean #CSP

Abstract: Jaeger, Vertigan, and Welsh [15] proved a dichotomy for the complexity of evaluating the Tutte polynomial at fixed points: The evaluation is #P-hard almost everywhere, and the remaining points admit polynomial-time algorithms. Dell, Husfeldt, and Wahl\'en [9] and Husfeldt and Taslaman [12], in combination with Curticapean [7], extended the #P-hardness results to tight lower bounds under the counting exponential time hypothesis #ETH, with the exception of the line $y=1$, which was left open. We complete the dichotomy theorem for the Tutte polynomial under #ETH by proving that the number of all acyclic subgraphs of a given $n$-vertex graph cannot be determined in time $exp(o(n))$ unless #ETH fails. Another dichotomy theorem we strengthen is the one of Creignou and Hermann [6] for counting the number of satisfying assignments to a constraint satisfaction problem instance over the Boolean domain. We prove that all #P-hard cases are also hard under #ETH. The main ingredient is to prove that the number of independent sets in bipartite graphs with $n$ vertices cannot be computed in time $exp(o(n))$ unless #ETH fails. In order to prove our results, we use the block interpolation idea by Curticapean [7] and transfer it to systems of linear equations that might not directly correspond to interpolation.