Graph sparsification has been studied extensively over the past two decades, culminating in spectral sparsifiers of optimal size (up to constant factors). Spectral hypergraph sparsification is a natural analogue of this problem, for which optimal bounds on the sparsifier size are not known, mainly because the hypergraph Laplacian is non-linear, and thus lacks the linear-algebraic structure and tools that have been so effective for graphs.

Our main contribution is the first algorithm for constructing epsilon-spectral sparsifiers for hyper-graphs with O*(n) hyperedges, where O* suppresses (epsilon(-1) log n)(O(1)) factors. This bound is independent of the rank r (maximum cardinality of a hyperedge), and is essentially best possible due to a recent bit complexity lower bound of Omega(nr) for hypergraph sparsification.

This result is obtained by introducing two new tools. First, we give a new proof of spectral concentration bounds for sparsifiers of graphs; it avoids linear-algebraic methods, replacing e.g. the usual application of the matrix Bernstein inequality and therefore applies to the (nonlinear) hypergraph setting. To achieve the result, we design a new sequence of hypergraphdependent epsilon-nets on the unit sphere in R-n. Second, we extend the weight-assignment technique of Chen, Khanna and Nagda [FOCS'20] to the spectral sparsification setting. Surprisingly, the number of spanning trees after the weight assignment can serve as a potential function guiding the reweighting process in the spectral setting.