Extrapolation of compactness on Banach function spaces

Abstract: We prove an extrapolation of compactness theorem for operators on Banach function spaces satisfying certain convexity and concavity conditions. In particular, we show that the boundedness of an operator $T$ in the weighted Lebesgue scale and the compactness of $T$ in the unweighted Lebesgue scale yields compactness of $T$ on a very general class of Banach function spaces. As our main new tool, we prove various characterizations of the boundedness of the Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator on such spaces and their associate spaces, using a novel sparse self-improvement technique. We apply our main results to prove compactness of the commutators of singular integral operators and pointwise multiplication by functions of vanishing mean oscillation on, for example, weighted variable Lebesgue spaces.