Counting hypergraph colorings in the local lemma regime

Abstract: We give a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) to count the number of $q$-colorings for $k$-uniform hypergraphs with maximum degree $\Delta$ if $k\ge 28$ and $q &gt;357\Delta<sup>{\frac{14}{k-14}}$. We also obtain a polynomial-time almost uniform sampler if $q&gt;931\Delta<sup>{\frac{16}{k-16/3}}$. These are the first approximate counting and sampling algorithms in the regime $q\ll\Delta$ (for large $\Delta$ and $k$) without any additional assumptions. Our method is based on the recent work of Moitra (STOC, 2017). One important contribution of ours is to remove the dependency of $k$ and $\Delta$ in Moitra's approach.