A quantitative container characterization of one-sided testability

Abstract

We give a quantitative combinatorial characterization of size-oblivious one-sided testability in the dense graph model, resolving a question of Alon, Fischer, Newman, and Shapira. For hereditary graph properties, we prove that one-sided testability is quantitatively equivalent to the existence of suitable hypergraph containers, a central and widely used tool in modern combinatorics. Combining this equivalence with the Alon-Shapira notion of semi-hereditariness yields a quantitative characterization of arbitrary graph properties. The correspondence is effective in both directions and provides explicit translations between tester complexity and container parameters. Our proof is regularity-free and extends uniformly to every fixed finite relational signature of bounded arity, including digraphs, coloured graphs, and hypergraphs. As applications, we obtain quantitative closure results for partition properties and testers for properties defined by the existence of a linearly large induced substructure.