Spectral Independence via Stability and Applications to Holant-Type Problems

This paper formalizes connections between stability of polynomials and convergence rates of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. We prove that if a (multivariate) partition function is nonzero in a region around a real point
$\lambda$
then spectral independence holds at
$\lambda$
. As a consequence, for Holant-type problems (e.g., spin systems) on bounded-degree graphs, we obtain optimal
$O(n\ \text{log}\ n)$
mixing time bounds for the single-site update Markov chain known as the Glauber dynamics. Our result significantly improves the running time guarantees obtained via the polynomial interpolation method of Barvi-nok (2017), refined by Patel and Regts (2017). There are a variety of applications of our results. In this paper, we focus on Holant-type (i.e., edge-coloring) problems, including weighted edge covers and weighted even subgraphs. For the weighted edge cover problem (and several natural generalizations) we obtain an
$O$
(
$n$
log n) sampling algorithm on bounded-degree graphs. The even subgraphs problem corresponds to the high-temperature expansion of the ferromagnetic Ising model. We obtain an
$O$
(
$n$
log n) sampling algorithm for the ferromagnetic Ising model with a nonzero external field on bounded-degree graphs, which improves upon the classical result of Jerrum and Sinclair (1993) for this class of graphs. We obtain further applications to antiferromagnetic two-spin models on line graphs, weighted graph homomorphisms, tensor networks, and more.