Andrei Romashchenko

Rostislav Matveev, Andrei Romashchenko

The Ingleton inequality is a classical linear information inequality that holds for representable matroids but fails to be universally valid for entropic vectors. Understanding the extent to which this inequality can be violated has been a longstanding problem in information theory. In this paper, we show that for a broad class of jointly distributed random variables $(X,Y)$ the Ingleton inequality holds up to a small additive error, even even though the mutual information between $X$ and $Y$ is far from being extractable. Contrary to common intuition, strongly non-extractable mutual information does not lead to large violations of the Ingleton inequality in this setting. More precisely, we consider pairs $(X,Y)$ that are uniformly distributed on their joint support and whose associated biregular bipartite graph is an expander. For all auxiliary random variables $A$ and $B$ jointly distributed with $(X,Y)$, we establish a lower bound on the Ingleton quantity $I(X;Y | A) + I(X;Y | B) + I(A;B) - I(X;Y)$ in terms of the spectral parameters of the underlying graph. Our proof combines the expander mixing lemma with a partitioning technique for finite sets.

Rostislav Matveev, Andrei Romashchenko

We study constrained versions of the Ingleton inequality in the entropic setting and quantify its stability under small violations of conditional independence. Although the classical Ingleton inequality fails for general entropy profiles, it is known to hold under certain exact independence constraints. We focus on the regime where selected conditional mutual information terms are small (but not zero), and the inequality continues to hold up to controlled error terms. A central technical tool is a structural lemma that materializes part of the mutual information between two random variables, implicitly capturing the effect of infinitely many non-Shannon--type inequalities. This leads to conceptually transparent proofs without explicitly invoking such infinite families. Some of our bounds recover, in a unified way, what can also be deduced from the infinite families of inequalities of Matúš (2007) and of Dougherty--Freiling--Zeger (2011), while others appear to be new.