Higher-order network adaptivity: co-evolution of higher-order structure and spreading dynamics

Abstract: The co-evolution of structure and dynamics, known as adaptivity, is a fundamental property in various systems and drives diverse emergent behaviors. However, the adaptivity in previous works is primarily stemmed from pairwise situations, while is insufficient to capture ubiquitous higher-order characteristics of real systems. Here, we introduce higher-order network adaptivity to model the co-evolution of higher-order structure and spreading dynamics, and theoretically analyze the thresholds and spreading sizes. Results demonstrate that both pairwise-like and higher-order adaptivity consistently increase spreading thresholds, but surprisingly produce completely opposing qualitative effects. Specifically, contrary to pairwise-like adaptivity, higher-order adaptivity not only reduces or even eliminates the bistable region, but also leads to shifts of phase transitions from discontinuous to continuous. These findings are validated on both synthetic and real hypergraphs. Our work introduces an idea of higher-order adaptivity and highlights its fundamental differences from pairwise-like adaptivity, advancing further researches of adaptive higher-order systems.