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Thomason [$\textit{Trans. Amer. Math. Soc.}$ 296.1 (1986)] proved that every sufficiently large tournament contains Hamilton paths and cycles with all possible orientations, except possibly the consistently oriented Hamilton cycle. This paper establishes $\textit{transversal}$ generalizations of these classical results. For a collection $\mathbf{T}=\{T_1,\dots,T_m\}$ of not-necessarily distinct tournaments on the common vertex set $V$, an $m$-edge directed subgraph $\mathcal{D}$ with the vertices in $V$ is called a transversal if there exists an bijection $\varphi\colon E(\mathcal{D})\to [m]$ such that $e\in E(T_{\varphi(e)})$ for all $e\in E(\mathcal{D})$. We prove that for sufficiently large $n$, there exist transversal Hamilton cycles of all possible orientations possibly except the consistently oriented one. We also obtain a similar result for the transversal Hamilton paths of all possible orientations. These results generalize the classical theorem of Thomason, and our approach provides another proof of this theorem.

Detecting implicit hate speech that is not directly hateful remains a challenge. Recent research has attempted to detect implicit hate speech by applying contrastive learning to pre-trained language models such as BERT and RoBERTa, but the proposed models still do not have a significant advantage over cross-entropy loss-based learning. We found that contrastive learning based on randomly sampled batch data does not encourage the model to learn hard negative samples. In this work, we propose Label-aware Hard Negative sampling strategies (LAHN) that encourage the model to learn detailed features from hard negative samples, instead of naive negative samples in random batch, using momentum-integrated contrastive learning. LAHN outperforms the existing models for implicit hate speech detection both in- and cross-datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Hanyang-HCC-Lab/LAHN, Comment: Accepted to ACL 2024 Findings

We present a new lower bound on the Bowen-Radin maximal density of radius-R ball packings in the m-dimensional hyperbolic space, improving on the basic covering bound by factor \Omega(m(R+\ln m)) as m tends to infinity. This is done by applying the recent theorem of Campos, Jenssen, Michelen and Sahasrabudhe on independent sets in graphs with sparse neighbourhoods., Comment: 18 pages

The famous Dirac's Theorem states that for each $n\geq 3$ every $n$-vertex graph $G$ with minimum degree $\delta(G)\geq n/2$ has a hamiltonian cycle. When $\delta(G)< n/2$, this cannot be guaranteed, but the existence of some other specific subgraphs can be provided. Gargano, Hell, Stacho and Vaccaro proved that every connected $n$-vertex graph $G$ with $\delta(G)\geq (n-1)/3$ contains a spanning {\em spider}, i.e., a spanning tree with at most one vertex of degree at least $3$. Later, Chen, Ferrara, Hu, Jacobson and Liu proved the stronger (and exact) result that for $n\geq 56$ every connected $n$-vertex graph $G$ with $\delta(G)\geq (n-2)/3$ contains a spanning {\em broom}, i.e., a spanning spider obtained by joining the center of a star to an endpoint of a path. They also showed that a $2$-connected graph $G$ with $\delta(G)\geq (n-2)/3$ and some additional properties contains a spanning {\em jellyfish} which is a graph obtained by gluing the center of a star to a vertex in a cycle disjoint from that star. Note that every spanning jellyfish contains a spanning broom. The goal of this paper is to prove an exact Ore-type bound which guarantees the existence of a spanning jellyfish: We prove that if $G$ is a $2$-connected graph on $n$ vertices such that every non-adjacent pair of vertices $(u,v)$ satisfies $d(u) + d(v) \geq \frac{2n-3}{3}$, then $G$ has a spanning jellyfish. As corollaries, we obtain strengthenings of two results by Chen et al.: a minimum degree condition guaranteeing the existence of a spanning jellyfish, and an Ore-type sufficient condition for the existence of a spanning broom. The corollaries are sharp for infinitely many $n$. One of the main ingredients of our proof is a modification of the Hopping Lemma due to Woodall.

Liu, Pach and S\'andor recently characterized all polynomials $p(z)$ such that the equation $x+y=p(z)$ is $2$-Ramsey, that is, any $2$-coloring of $\mathbb{N}$ contains infinitely many monochromatic solutions for $x+y=p(z)$. In this paper, we find asymptotically tight bounds for the following two quantitative questions. $\bullet$ For $n\in \mathbb{N}$, what is the longest interval $[n,f(n)]$ of natural numbers which admits a $2$-coloring with no monochromatic solutions of $x+y=p(z)$? $\bullet$ For $n\in \mathbb{N}$ and a $2$-coloring of the first $n$ integers $[n]$, what is the smallest possible number $g(n)$ of monochromatic solutions of $x+y=p(z)$? Our theorems determine $f(n)$ up to a multiplicative constant $2+o(1)$, and determine the asymptotics for $g(n)$.

Let $f^{(r)}(n;s,k)$ denote the maximum number of edges in an $n$-vertex $r$-uniform hypergraph containing no subgraph with $k$ edges and at most $s$ vertices. Brown, Erd\H{o}s and S\'os [New directions in the theory of graphs (Proc. Third Ann Arbor Conf., Univ. Michigan 1971), pp. 53--63, Academic Press 1973] conjectured that the limit $\lim_{n\rightarrow \infty}n^{-2}f^{(3)}(n;k+2,k)$ exists for all $k$. The value of the limit was previously determined for $k=2$ in the original paper of Brown, Erd\H{o}s and S\'os, for $k=3$ by Glock [Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 51 (2019) 230--236] and for $k=4$ by Glock, Joos, Kim, K\"uhn, Lichev and Pikhurko [arXiv:2209.14177, accepted by Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.] while Delcourt and Postle [arXiv:2210.01105, accepted by Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.] proved the conjecture (without determining the limiting value). In this paper, we determine the value of the limit in the Brown-Erd\H{o}s-S\'os Problem for $k\in \{5,6,7\}$. More generally, we obtain the value of $\lim_{n\rightarrow \infty}n^{-2}f^{(r)}(n;rk-2k+2,k)$ for all $r\geq 3$ and $k\in \{5,6,7\}$. In addition, by combining these new values with recent results of Bennett, Cushman and Dudek [arXiv:2309.00182] we obtain new asymptotic values for several generalised Ramsey numbers., Comment: 44 pages, 3 figures

Considerable efforts are currently underway to mitigate the negative impacts of echo chambers, such as increased susceptibility to fake news and resistance towards accepting scientific evidence. Prior research has presented the development of computer systems that support the consumption of news information from diverse political perspectives to mitigate the echo chamber effect. However, existing studies still lack the ability to effectively support the key processes of news information consumption and quantitatively identify a political stance towards the information. In this paper, we present HearHere, an AI-based web system designed to help users accommodate information and opinions from diverse perspectives. HearHere facilitates the key processes of news information consumption through two visualizations. Visualization 1 provides political news with quantitative political stance information, derived from our graph-based political classification model, and users can experience diverse perspectives (Hear). Visualization 2 allows users to express their opinions on specific political issues in a comment form and observe the position of their own opinions relative to pro-liberal and pro-conservative comments presented on a map interface (Here). Through a user study with 94 participants, we demonstrate the feasibility of HearHere in supporting the consumption of information from various perspectives. Our findings highlight the importance of providing political stance information and quantifying users' political status as a means to mitigate political polarization. In addition, we propose design implications for system development, including the consideration of demographics such as political interest and providing users with initiatives., Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables, CSCW 2024

Given a graph $H$, a balanced subdivision of $H$ is obtained by replacing all edges of $H$ with internally disjoint paths of the same length. In this paper, we prove that for any graph $H$, a linear-in-$e(H)$ bound on average degree guarantees a balanced $H$-subdivision. This strengthens an old result of Bollob\'as and Thomason, and resolves a question of Gil-Fern\'{a}ndez, Hyde, Liu, Pikhurko and Wu. We observe that this linear bound on average degree is best possible whenever $H$ is logarithmically dense. We further show that this logarithmic density is the critical threshold: for many graphs $H$ below this density, its subdivisions are forcible by a sublinear bound in $e(H)$ on average degree. We provide such examples by proving that the subdivisions of any almost bipartite graph $H$ with sublogarithmic density are forcible by a sublinear-in-$e(H)$ bound on average degree, provided that $H$ satisfies some additional separability condition., Comment: 34 pages, 2 pages, Comments welcome!

In 1994, Alon construct a triangle-free $(n,d,\lambda)$-graph with $d = \Omega(n^{2/3})$ and $\lambda = O(d^{1/2})$ for an exponentially increasing sequence of integers $n$. Using his ingenious construction, we deduce that there exist triangle-free $(n,d,\lambda)$-graphs with $d = \Omega(n^{2/3})$ and $\lambda = O( (d \log n)^{1/2} )$ for all sufficiently large $n$., Comment: 9 pages

For a given collection $\mathcal{G} = (G_1,\dots, G_k)$ of graphs on a common vertex set $V$, which we call a \emph{graph system}, a graph $H$ on a vertex set $V(H) \subseteq V$ is called a \emph{rainbow subgraph} of $\mathcal{G}$ if there exists an injective function $\psi:E(H) \rightarrow [k]$ such that $e \in G_{\psi(e)}$ for each $e\in E(H)$. The maximum value of $\min_{i}\{|E(G_i)|\}$ over $n$-vertex graph systems $\mathcal{G}$ having no rainbow subgraph isomorphic to $H$ is called the rainbow Tur\'{a}n number $\mathrm{ex}_k^{\ast}(n, H)$ of $H$. In this article, we study the rainbow Tur\'{a}n density $\pi_k^{\ast}(T) = \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} \frac{\mathrm{ex}_k^{\ast}(n, T)}{\binom{n}{2}}$ of a tree $T$. While the classical Tur\'{a}n density $\pi(H)$ of a graph $H$ lies in the set $\{1-\frac{1}{t} : t\in \mathbb{N}\}$, the rainbow Tur\'{a}n density exhibits different behaviors as it can even be an irrational number. Nevertheless, we conjecture that the rainbow Tur\'{a}n density is always an algebraic number. We provide evidence for this conjecture by proving that the rainbow Tur\'{a}n density of a tree is an algebraic number. To show this, we identify the structure of extremal graphs for rainbow trees. Moreover, we further determine all tuples $(\alpha_1,\dots, \alpha_k)$ such that every graph system $(G_1,\dots,G_k)$ satisfying $|E(G_i)|>(\alpha_i+o(1))\binom{n}{2}$ contains all rainbow $k$-edge trees. In the course of proving these results, we also develop the theory on the limit of graph systems., Comment: 24pages + 9 page appendix, 2 figures

Consistency and reliability are crucial for conducting AI research. Many famous research fields, such as object detection, have been compared and validated with solid benchmark frameworks. After AlphaFold2, the protein folding task has entered a new phase, and many methods are proposed based on the component of AlphaFold2. The importance of a unified research framework in protein folding contains implementations and benchmarks to consistently and fairly compare various approaches. To achieve this, we present Solvent, a protein folding framework that supports significant components of state-of-the-art models in the manner of an off-the-shelf interface Solvent contains different models implemented in a unified codebase and supports training and evaluation for defined models on the same dataset. We benchmark well-known algorithms and their components and provide experiments that give helpful insights into the protein structure modeling field. We hope that Solvent will increase the reliability and consistency of proposed models and give efficiency in both speed and costs, resulting in acceleration on protein folding modeling research. The code is available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/solvent, and the project will continue to be developed., Comment: preprint, 9pages

It is well-known that every tournament contains a Hamilton path, and every strongly connected tournament contains a Hamilton cycle. This paper establishes transversal generalizations of these classical results. For a collection $\mathbf{T}=\{T_1,\dots,T_m\}$ of not-necessarily distinct tournaments on a common vertex set $V$, an $m$-edge directed graph $\mathcal{D}$ with vertices in $V$ is called a $\mathbf{T}$-transversal if there exists a bijection $\phi\colon E(\mathcal{D})\to [m]$ such that $e\in E(T_{\phi(e)})$ for all $e\in E(\mathcal{D})$. We prove that for sufficiently large $m$ with $m=|V|-1$, there exists a $\mathbf{T}$-transversal Hamilton path. Moreover, if $m=|V|$ and at least $m-1$ of the tournaments $T_1,\ldots,T_m$ are assumed to be strongly connected, then there is a $\mathbf{T}$-transversal Hamilton cycle. In our proof, we utilize a novel way of partitioning tournaments which we dub $\mathbf{H}$-partition.

Hansel's lemma states that $\sum_{H\in \mathcal{H}}|H| \geq n \log_2 n$ holds where $\mathcal{H}$ is a collection of bipartite graphs covering all the edges of $K_n$. We generalize this lemma to the corresponding multigraph covering problem and the graphon covering problem. We also prove an upper bound on $\sum_{H\in \mathcal{H}}|H|$ which shows that our generalization is asymptotically tight in some sense., Comment: 13 pages

The political stance prediction for news articles has been widely studied to mitigate the echo chamber effect -- people fall into their thoughts and reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. The previous works for the political stance problem focus on (1) identifying political factors that could reflect the political stance of a news article and (2) capturing those factors effectively. Despite their empirical successes, they are not sufficiently justified in terms of how effective their identified factors are in the political stance prediction. Motivated by this, in this work, we conduct a user study to investigate important factors in political stance prediction, and observe that the context and tone of a news article (implicit) and external knowledge for real-world entities appearing in the article (explicit) are important in determining its political stance. Based on this observation, we propose a novel knowledge-aware approach to political stance prediction (KHAN), employing (1) hierarchical attention networks (HAN) to learn the relationships among words and sentences in three different levels and (2) knowledge encoding (KE) to incorporate external knowledge for real-world entities into the process of political stance prediction. Also, to take into account the subtle and important difference between opposite political stances, we build two independent political knowledge graphs (KG) (i.e., KG-lib and KG-con) by ourselves and learn to fuse the different political knowledge. Through extensive evaluations on three real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of DASH in terms of (1) accuracy, (2) efficiency, and (3) effectiveness., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 10 tables, the Web Conference 2023 (WWW)

Given a collection $\mathcal{G}=(G_1,\dots, G_h)$ of graphs on the same vertex set $V$ of size $n$, an $h$-edge graph $H$ on the vertex set $V$ is a $\mathcal{G}$-transversal if there exists a bijection $\lambda : E(H) \rightarrow [h]$ such that $e\in E(G_{\lambda(e)})$ for each $e\in E(H)$. The conditions on the minimum degree $\delta(\mathcal{G})=\min_{i\in[h]}\{ \delta(G_i)\}$ for finding a spanning $\mathcal{G}$-transversal isomorphic to a graph $H$ have been actively studied when $H$ is a Hamilton cycle, an $F$-factor, a spanning tree with maximum degree $o(n/\log n)$ and a power of a Hamilton cycle, etc. In this paper, we determined the asymptotically tight threshold on $\delta(\mathcal{G})$ for finding a $\mathcal{G}$-transversal isomorphic to $H$ when $H$ is a general $n$-vertex graph with bounded maximum degree and $o(n)$-bandwidth. This provides a transversal generalization of the celebrated Bandwidth theorem by B\"ottcher, Schacht and Taraz.

We investigate quiver representations over $\mathbb{F}_1$. Coefficient quivers are combinatorial gadgets equivalent to $\mathbb{F}_1$-representations of quivers. We focus on the case when the quiver $Q$ is a pseudotree. For such quivers, we first use the notion of coefficient quivers to provide a complete classification of asymptotic behaviors of indecomposable representations over $\mathbb{F}_1$. Then, we prove some fundamental structural results about the Lie algebras associated to pseudotrees. Finally, we construct examples of $\mathbb{F}_1$-representations $M$ of a quiver $Q$ by using coverings, under which the Euler characteristics of the quiver Grassmannians $\textrm{Gr}^Q_{\underline{d}}(M)$ can be computed in a purely combinatorial way., Comment: 26 pages

We prove that every properly edge-colored $n$-vertex graph with average degree at least $100(\log n)^2$ contains a rainbow cycle, improving upon $(\log n)^{2+o(1)}$ bound due to Tomon. We also prove that every properly colored $n$-vertex graph with at least $10^5 k^2 n^{1+1/k}$ edges contains a rainbow $2k$-cycle, which improves the previous bound $2^{ck^2}n^{1+1/k}$ obtained by Janzer. Our method using homomorphism inequalities and a lopsided regularization lemma also provides a simple way to prove the Erd\H{o}s--Simonovits supersaturation theorem for even cycles, which may be of independent interest.

Let $f^{(r)}(n;s,k)$ be the maximum number of edges of an $r$-uniform hypergraph on $n$ vertices not containing a subgraph with $k$ edges and at most $s$ vertices. In 1973, Brown, Erd\H{o}s and S\'os conjectured that the limit $$\lim_{n\to \infty} n^{-2} f^{(3)}(n;k+2,k)$$ exists for all $k$ and confirmed it for $k=2$. Recently, Glock showed this for $k=3$. We settle the next open case, $k=4$, by showing that $f^{(3)}(n;6,4)=\left(\frac{7}{36}+o(1)\right)n^2$ as $n\to\infty$. More generally, for all $k\in \{3,4\}$, $r\ge 3$ and $t\in [2,r-1]$, we compute the value of the limit $\lim_{n\to \infty} n^{-t}f^{(r)}(n;k(r-t)+t,k)$, which settles a problem of Shangguan and Tamo., Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures

Hypertrees are linear hypergraphs where every two vertices are connected by a unique path. Elliott and R\"{o}dl conjectured that for any given $\mu>0$, there exists $n_0$ such that the following holds. Every $n$-vertex Steiner triple system contains all hypertrees with at most $(1-\mu)n$ vertices whenever $n\geq n_0$. We prove this conjecture., Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures

For a given graph $H$, its subdivisions carry the same topological structure. The existence of $H$-subdivisions within a graph $G$ has deep connections with topological, structural and extremal properties of $G$. One prominent example of such a connection, due to Bollob\'{a}s and Thomason and independently Koml\'os and Szemer\'edi, asserts that the average degree of $G$ being $d$ ensures a $K_{\Omega(\sqrt{d})}$-subdivision in $G$. Although this square-root bound is best possible, various results showed that much larger clique subdivisions can be found in a graph for many natural classes. We investigate the connection between crux, a notion capturing the essential order of a graph, and the existence of large clique subdivisions. This reveals the unifying cause underpinning all those improvements for various classes of graphs studied. Roughly speaking, when embedding subdivisions, natural space constraints arise; and such space constraints can be measured via crux. Our main result gives an asymptotically optimal bound on the size of a largest clique subdivision in a generic graph $G$, which is determined by both its average degree and its crux size. As corollaries, we obtain (1) a characterisation of extremal graphs for which the square-root bound above is tight: they are essentially disjoint unions of graphs having crux size linear in $d$; (2) a unifying approach to find a clique subdivision of almost optimal size in graphs which do not contain a fixed bipartite graph as a subgraph; (3) and that the clique subdivision size in random graphs $G(n,p)$ witnesses a dichotomy: when $p = \omega(n^{-1/2})$, the barrier is the space, while when $p=o( n^{-1/2})$, the bottleneck is the density., Comment: 33 pages, 2 figures

A celebrated theorem of Pippenger, and Frankl and R\"odl states that every almost-regular, uniform hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ with small maximum codegree has an almost-perfect matching. We extend this result by obtaining a ``conflict-free'' matching, where conflicts are encoded via a collection $\mathcal{C}$ of subsets $C\subseteq E(\mathcal{H})$. We say that a matching $\mathcal{M}\subseteq E(\mathcal{H})$ is conflict-free if $\mathcal{M}$ does not contain an element of $\mathcal{C}$ as a subset. Under natural assumptions on $\mathcal{C}$, we prove that $\mathcal{H}$ has a conflict-free, almost-perfect matching. This has many applications, one of which yields new asymptotic results for so-called ``high-girth'' Steiner systems. Our main tool is a random greedy algorithm which we call the ``conflict-free matching process''., Comment: 58 pages

There has been extensive studies on the following question: given $k$ graphs $G_1,\dots, G_k$ over a common vertex set of size $n$, what conditions on $G_i$ ensures a `colorful' copy of $H$, i.e., a copy of $H$ containing at most one edge from each $G_i$? A lower bound on $\sum_{i\in [k]} e(G_i)$ enforcing a colorful copy of a given graph $H$ was considered by Keevash, Saks, Sudakov, and Verstra\"{e}te. They defined $\operatorname{ex}_k(n,H)$ to be the maximum total number of edges of the graphs $G_1,\dots, G_k$ on a common vertex set of size $n$ having no colorful copy of $H$. They completely determined $\operatorname{ex}_k(n,K_r)$ for large $n$ by showing that, depending on the value of $k$, one of the two natural constructions is always the extremal construction. Moreover, they conjectured the same holds for every color-critical graphs and proved it for 3-color-critical graphs. We prove their conjecture for 4-color-critical graphs and for almost all $r$-color-critical graphs when $r > 4$. Moreover, we show that for every non-color-critical non-bipartite graphs, none of the two natural constructions is extremal for certain values of $k$. This answers a question of Keevash, Saks, Sudakov, and Verstra\"{e}te.

The families $\mathcal F_0,\ldots,\mathcal F_s$ of $k$-element subsets of $[n]:=\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ are called cross-union if there is no choice of $F_0\in \mathcal F_0, \ldots, F_s\in \mathcal F_s$ such that $F_0\cup\ldots\cup F_s=[n]$. A natural generalization of the celebrated Erd\H{o}s--Ko--Rado theorem, due to Frankl and Tokushige, states that for $n\le (s+1)k$ the geometric mean of $\lvert \mathcal F_i\rvert$ is at most $\binom{n-1}{k}$. Frankl conjectured that the same should hold for the arithmetic mean under some mild conditions. We prove Frankl's conjecture in a strong form by showing that the unique (up to isomorphism) maximizer for the arithmetic mean of cross-union families is the natural one $\mathcal F_0=\ldots=\mathcal F_s={[n-1]\choose k}$., Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure Accepted at Combinatorial Theory

We give some natural sufficient conditions for balls in a metric space to have small intersection. Roughly speaking, this happens when the metric space is (i) expanding and (ii) well-spread, and (iii) a certain random variable on the boundary of a ball has a small tail. As applications, we show that the volume of intersection of balls in Hamming, Johnson spaces and symmetric groups decay exponentially as their centers drift apart. To verify condition (iii), we prove some large deviation inequalities `on a slice' for functions with Lipschitz conditions. We then use these estimates on intersection volumes to $\bullet$ obtain a sharp lower bound on list-decodability of random $q$-ary codes, confirming a conjecture of Li and Wootters; and $\bullet$ improve the classical bound of Levenshtein from 1971 on constant weight codes by a factor linear in dimension, resolving a problem raised by Jiang and Vardy. Our probabilistic point of view also offers a unified framework to obtain improvements on other Gilbert--Varshamov type bounds, giving conceptually simple and calculation-free proofs for $q$-ary codes, permutation codes, and spherical codes. Another consequence is a counting result on the number of codes, showing ampleness of large codes., Comment: 25 pages

The Ramsey number $R(F,H)$ is the minimum number $N$ such that any $N$-vertex graph either contains a copy of $F$ or its complement contains $H$. Burr in 1981 proved a pleasingly general result that for any graph $H$, provided $n$ is sufficiently large, a natural lower bound construction gives the correct Ramsey number involving cycles: $R(C_n,H)=(n-1)(\chi(H)-1)+\sigma(H)$, where $\sigma(H)$ is the minimum possible size of a colour class in a $\chi(H)$-colouring of $H$. Allen, Brightwell and Skokan conjectured that the same should be true already when $n\geq |H|\chi(H)$. We improve this 40-year-old result of Burr by giving quantitative bounds of the form $n\geq C|H|\log^4\chi(H)$, which is optimal up to the logarithmic factor. In particular, this proves a strengthening of the Allen-Brightwell-Skokan conjecture for all graphs $H$ with large chromatic number., Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures. Final version to appear in Forum of Mathematics, Sigma

The following question was proposed by Nenadov and Pehova and reiterated by Knierim and Su: Given integers $\ell,r$ and $n$ with $n\in r\mathbb{N}$, is it true that every $n$-vertex graph $G$ with $\delta(G) \ge \max \{ \frac{1}{2},\frac{r - \ell}{r} \}n + o(n)$ and $\alpha_{\ell}(G) = o(n) $ contains a $K_{r}$-factor? We give a negative answer for the case when $\ell\ge \frac{3r}{4}$ by giving a family of constructions using the so-called cover thresholds and show that the minimum degree condition given by our construction is asymptotically best possible. That is, for all integers $r,\ell$ with $r > \ell \ge \frac{3}{4}r$ and $\mu >0$, there exist $\alpha > 0$ and $N$ such that for every $n\in r\mathbb{N}$ with $n>N$, every $n$-vertex graph $G$ with $\delta(G) \ge \left( \frac{1}{2-\varrho_{\ell}(r-1)} + \mu \right)n $ and $\alpha_{\ell}(G) \le \alpha n$ contains a $K_{r}$-factor. Here $\varrho_{\ell}(r-1)$ is the Ramsey--Tur\'an density for $K_{r-1}$ under the $\ell$-independence number condition., Comment: 23 pages,2 figures

Let the kissing number $K(d)$ be the maximum number of non-overlapping unit balls in $\mathbb R^d$ that can touch a given unit ball. Determining or estimating the number $K(d)$ has a long history, with the value of $K(3)$ being the subject of a famous discussion between Gregory and Newton in 1694. We prove that, as the dimension $d$ goes to infinity, $$ K(d)\ge (1+o(1)){\frac{\sqrt{3\pi}}{4\sqrt2}}\,\log\frac{3}{2}\cdot d^{3/2}\cdot \Big(\frac{2}{\sqrt{3}}\Big)^{d}, $$ thus improving the previously best known bound of Jenssen, Joos and Perkins by a factor of $\log(3/2)/\log(9/8)+o(1)=3.442...$. Our proof is based on the novel approach from Jenssen, Joos and Perkins that uses the hard core sphere model of an appropriate fugacity. Similar constant-factor improvements in lower bounds are also obtained for general spherical codes, as well as for the expected density of random sphere packings in the Euclidean space $\mathbb R^d$., Comment: 20 pages