A dichotomy for succinct representations of homomorphisms

Abstract: The task of computing homomorphisms between two finite relational structures $\mathcal{A}$ and $\mathcal{B}$ is a well-studied question with numerous applications. Since the set $\operatorname{Hom}(\mathcal{A},\mathcal{B})$ of all homomorphisms may be very large having a method of representing it in a succinct way, especially one which enables us to perform efficient enumeration and counting, could be extremely useful. One simple yet powerful way of doing so is to decompose $\operatorname{Hom}(\mathcal{A},\mathcal{B})$ using union and Cartesian product. Such data structures, called d-representations, have been introduced by Olteanu and Zavodny in the context of database theory. Their results also imply that if the treewidth of the left-hand side structure $\mathcal{A}$ is bounded, then a d-representation of polynomial size can be found in polynomial time. We show that for structures of bounded arity this is optimal: if the treewidth is unbounded then there are instances where the size of any d-representation is superpolynomial. Along the way we develop tools for proving lower bounds on the size of d-representations, in particular we define a notion of reduction suitable for this context and prove an almost tight lower bound on the size of d-representations of all $k$-cliques in a graph.