{"ID":2858957,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07422","arxiv_id":"2510.07422","title":"Homomorphism Problems in Graph Databases and Automatic Structures","abstract":"This thesis investigates the central role of homomorphism problems (structure-preserving maps) in two complementary domains: database querying over finite, graph-shaped data, and constraint solving over (potentially infinite) structures. Building on the well-known equivalence between conjunctive query evaluation and homomorphism existence, the first part focuses on conjunctive regular path queries, a standard extension of conjunctive queries that incorporates regular-path predicates. We study the fundamental problem of query minimization under two measures: the number of atoms (constraints) and the tree-width of the query graph. In both cases, we prove the problem to be decidable, and provide efficient algorithms for a large fragment of queries used in practice. The second part of the thesis lifts homomorphism problems to automatic structures, which are infinite structures describable by finite automata. We highlight a dichotomy, between homomorphism problems over automatic structures that are decidable in non-deterministic logarithmic space, and those that are undecidable (proving to be the more common case). In contrast to this prevalence of undecidability, we then focus on the language-theoretic properties of these structures, and show, relying on a novel algebraic language theory, that for any well-behaved logic (a pseudovariety), whether an automatic structure can be described in this logic is decidable.","short_abstract":"This thesis investigates the central role of homomorphism problems (structure-preserving maps) in two complementary domains: database querying over finite, graph-shaped data, and constraint solving over (potentially infinite) structures. Building on the well-known equivalence between conjunctive query evaluation and ho...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07422","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07422v1","authors":"[\"Rémi Morvan\"]","published":"2025-10-08T18:23:00Z","proceeding":"cs.LO","tasks":"[\"cs.LO\",\"cs.DB\",\"cs.FL\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}