# Weisfeiler-Leman meets Homomorphisms

In this paper, we relate a beautiful theory by Lovász with a popular heuristic algorithm for the graph isomorphism problem, namely the color refinement algorithm and its k-dimensional generalization known as the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm. We prove that two graphs G and H are indistinguishable by the color refinement algorithm if and only if, for all trees T, the number hom(T,G) of homomorphisms from T to G equals the corresponding number hom(T,H) for H. There is a natural system of linear equations whose nonnegative integer solutions correspond to the isomorphisms between two graphs. The non-negative real solutions to this system are called fractional isomorphisms, and two graphs are fractionally isomorphic if and only if the color refinement algorithm cannot distinguish them (Tinhofer 1986, 1991). We show that, if we drop the non-negativity constraints, that is, if we look for arbitrary real solutions, then a solution to the linear system exists if and only if, for all t, the two graphs have the same number of length-t walks. We lift the results for trees to an equivalence between numbers of homomorphisms from graphs of tree width k, the k-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm, and the level-k Sherali-Adams relaxation of our linear program. We also obtain a partial result for graphs of path width k and solutions to our system where we drop the non-negativity constraints. A consequence of our results is a quasi-linear time algorithm to decide whether, for two given graphs G and H, there is a tree T with hom(T,G)≠hom(T,H).

## Authors

• 9 publications
• 35 publications
• 4 publications
• ### Color Refinement, Homomorphisms, and Hypergraphs

Recent results show that the structural similarity of graphs can be char...
03/29/2019 ∙ by Jan Böker, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Graph Similarity and Homomorphism Densities

We introduce the tree distance, a new distance measure on graphs. The tr...
04/29/2021 ∙ by Jan Böker, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Well-indumatched Trees and Graphs of Bounded Girth

A graph G is called well-indumatched if all of its maximal induced match...
03/07/2019 ∙ by S. Akbari, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Linear Tree Constraints

Linear tree constraints were introduced by Hofmann and Rodriguez in the ...
06/26/2018 ∙ by Sabine Bauer, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Integrality Gaps for Bounded Color Matchings

We investigate the performance of two common lift-and-project techniques...
01/24/2018 ∙ by Steven Kelk, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Best Match Graphs with Binary Trees

Best match graphs (BMG) are a key intermediate in graph-based orthology ...
11/01/2020 ∙ by David Schaller, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Walk refinement, walk logic, and the iteration number of the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm

We show that the 2-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm stabilizes n-v...
05/08/2019 ∙ by Moritz Lichter, et al. ∙ 0

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## 1 Introduction

An old result due to Lovász [18] states a graph can be characterized by counting homomorphisms from all graphs to . That is, two graphs and are isomorphic if and only if, for all , the number of homomorphisms from to equals the number of homomorphism from to . This simple result has far reaching consequences, because mapping graphs to their homomorphism vectors

(or suitably scaled versions of these infinite vectors) allows us to apply tools from functional analysis in graph theory. This is the foundation of the beautiful theory of graph limits, developed by Lovász and others over the last 15 years (see

[19]).

However, from a computational perspective, representing graphs by their homomorphism vectors has the disadvantage that the problem of computing the entries of these vectors is NP-complete. To avoid this difficulty, we may want to restrict the homomorphism vectors to entries from a class of graphs for which counting homomorphisms is tractable. That is, instead of considering the full homomorphism vector we consider the vector for a class of graphs such that the problem of computing for given graphs and is in polynomial time. Arguably the most natural example of such a class is the class of all trees. More generally, computing for given graphs and is in polynomial time for all classes of bounded tree width, and under a natural assumption from parameterized complexity theory, it is not in polynomial time for any class of unbounded tree width [11]. This immediately raises the question what the vector , for a class of bounded tree width, tells us about the graph .

A first nice example (Proposition 4) is that the vector for the class of all cycles characterizes the spectrum of a graph, that is, for graphs we have if and only if the adjacency matrices of and

have the same eigenvalues with the same multiplicities. This equivalence is a basic observation in spectral graph theory (see

[25, Lemma 1]). Before we state deeper results along these lines, let us describe a different (though related) motivation for this research.

Determining the similarity between two graphs is an important problem with many applications, mainly in machine learning, where it is known as “graph matching” (e.g.

[9]). But how can the similarity between graphs be measured? An obvious idea is to use the edit distance, which simply counts how many edges and vertices have to be deleted from or added to one graph to obtain the other. However, two graphs that have a small edit distance can nevertheless be structurally quite dissimilar (e.g. [19, Section 1.5.1]). The edit distance is also very hard to compute as it is closely related to the notoriously difficult quadratic assignment problem (e.g. [3, 21]).

Homomorphism vectors offer an alternative, more structurally oriented approach to measuring graph similarity. After suitably scaling the vectors, we can can compare them using standard vector norms. This idea is reminiscent of the “graph kernels” used in machine learning (e.g. [26]). Like the homomorphism vectors, many graph kernels are based on the idea of counting certain patterns in graphs, such as paths, walks, cycles or subtrees, and in fact any inner product on the homomorphism vectors yields a graph kernel.

A slightly different type of graph kernel is the so-called Weisfeiler-Leman (subtree) kernel [22]. This kernel is derived from the color refinement algorithm (a.k.a. the 1-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm), which is a simple and efficient heuristic to test whether two graphs are isomorphic (e.g. [13]). The algorithm computes a coloring of the vertices of a graph based on the iterated degree sequences, we give the details in Section 3. To use it as an isomorphism test, we compare the color patterns of two graphs. If they are different, we say that color refinement distinguishes the graphs. If the color patterns of the two graphs turn out to be the same, the graphs may still be non-isomorphic, but the algorithm fails to detect this.

Whether color refinement is able to distinguish two graphs  and  has a very nice linear-algebraic characterization due to Tinhofer [23, 24]. Let  and be the vertex sets and let and be the adjacency matrices of  and , respectively. Now consider the system  of linear equations:

(F1) (F2) (F3)

In these equations, denotes a -matrix of variables and denotes the all-1 vector over the index set . Equations (F2) and (F3) simply state that all row and column sums of  are supposed to be . Thus the nonnegative integer solutions to are permutation matrices, which due to (F1) describe isomorphisms between  and . The nonnegative real solutions to , which in fact are always rational, are called fractional isomorphisms between  and . Tinhofer proved that two graphs are fractionally isomorphic if and only if color refinement does not distinguish them.

For every , color refinement has a generalization, known as the -dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm (-WL), which colors not the vertices of the given graph but -tuples of vertices. Atserias and Maneva [4] (also see [20]) generalized Tinhofer’s theorem by establishing a close correspondence between -WL and the level- Sherali-Adams relaxation of .

### Our results

How expressive are homomorphism vectors for restricted graph classes  ? We consider the class of trees first, where the answer is surprisingly clean.

For all graphs and , the following are equivalent:

1. .

2. Color refinement does not distinguish and .

3. and are fractionally isomorphic, that is, the system of linear equations has a nonnegative real solution.

As mentioned before, the equivalence between ii and iii is due to Tinhofer [23, 24]. An unexpected consequence of our theorem is that we can decide in time whether holds for two given graphs and with vertices and  edges. (If two graphs have a different number of vertices or edges, then their homomorphism counts already differ on the 1-vertex or 2-vertex trees.) This is remarkable, because every known algorithm for computing the entry of the vector requires quadratic time when  and  are given as input.

It is a consequence of the proof of Theorem 1 that, in order to characterize an -vertex graph  up to fractional isomorphisms, it suffices to restrict the homomorphism vector  to trees of height at most . What happens if we restrict the structure of trees even further? In particular, let us restrict the homomorphism vector to its path entries, that is, consider  for the class  of all paths. Figure 1 shows an example of two graphs  and  with and .

Despite their weaker distinguishing capabilities, the vectors are quite interesting. They are related to graph kernels based on counting walks, and they have a clean algebraic description: it is easy to see that , the number of homomorphisms from the path of length to , is equal to the number of length- walks in , which in turn is equal to , where  is the adjacency matrix of and is the all- vector of appropriate length.

For all graphs and , the following are equivalent:

1. .

2. The system of linear equations has a real solution.

While the proof of Theorem 1 is mainly graph-theoretic—we establish the equivalence between the assertions i and ii by expressing the “colors” of color refinement in terms of specific tree homomorphisms—the proof of Theorem 1 is purely algebraic. We use spectral techniques, but with a twist, because neither does the spectrum of a graph determine the vector nor does the vector determine the spectrum. This is in contrast with  for the class  of all cycles, which, as we already mentioned, distinguishes two graphs if and only if they have the same spectrum.

Let us now turn to homomorphism vectors for the class of all graphs of tree width at most . We will relate these to -WL, the -dimensional generalization of color refinement. We also obtain a corresponding system of linear equations. Let and be graphs with vertex sets and , respectively. Instead of variables for vertex pairs , as in the system , the new system has variables for of size . We call a partial bijection if holds for all , and we call it a partial isomorphism if in addition holds for all . Now consider the following system  of linear equations:

 ∑v∈VXπ∪{(v,w)} =Xπ (L1) ∑w∈WXπ∪{(v,w)} =Xπ (L2) Xπ =0 (L3) X∅ =1 (L4)

This system is closely related to the Sherali-Adams relaxations of : Every solution for the level- Sherali-Adams relaxation of yields a solution to , and every solution to yields a solution to the level Sherali-Adams relaxation of [4, 14]. Our result is this:

For all and for all graphs and , the following are equivalent:

1. .

2. -WL does not distinguish and .

3. has a nonnegative real solution.

The equivalence between ii and iii is implicit in previous work [16, 4, 14]. The system  has another nice interpretation related to the proof complexity of graph isomorphism: it is shown in [7] that has a real solution if and only if a natural system of polynomial equations encoding the isomorphisms between and has a degree- solution in the Hilbert Nullstellensatz proof system [6, 8]. In view of Theorem 1, it is tempting to conjecture that the solvability of characterizes the expressiveness of the homomorphism vectors for the class of all graphs of path width . Unfortunately, we only prove one direction of this conjecture.

Let be an integer with and let be graphs. If has a real solution, then .

Combining this theorem with a recent result from [15] separating the nonnegative from arbitrary real solutions of our systems of equations, we obtain the following corollary.

For every , there are graphs and with and .

## 2 Preliminaries

#### Basics.

Graphs in this paper are simple, undirected, and finite (even though our results transfer to directed graphs and even to weighted graphs). For a graph , we write  for its vertex set and  for its edge set. For , the set of neighbors of  are denoted with . For , we denote with  the subgraph of  induced by the vertices of . A rooted graph is a graph  together with a designated root vertex . We write multisets using the notation .

#### Matrices.

An -decomposition of a matrix  consists of a lower triangular matrix  and an upper triangular matrix  such that holds. Every finite matrix  over  has an -decomposition. We also use infinite matrices over , which are functions  where  and  are locally finite posets and countable. The matrix product  is defined in the natural way via if all of these inner products are finite sums, and otherwise we leave it undefined. An

real symmetric matrix has real eigenvalues and a corresponding set of orthogonal eigenspaces. The spectral decomposition of a real symmetric matrix

is of the form where are the eigenvalues of  with corresponding eigenspaces . Moreover, each  is the projection matrix corresponding to the projection onto the eigenspace . Usually, is expressed as for a matrix whose columns form an orthonormal basis of .

#### Homomorphism numbers.

Recall that a mapping is a homomorphism if holds for all and that is the number of homomorphisms from  to . Let be the number of homomorphisms from  to  that are surjective on both the vertices and edges of . Let be the number of injective homomorphisms from  to . Let , where is the number of automorphisms of . Observe that is the number of subgraphs of  that are isomorphic to . Where convenient, we view the objects , , and as infinite matrices; the matrix indices are all unlabeled graphs, sorted by their size. However, we only use one representative of each isomorphism class, called the isomorphism type of the graphs in the class, as an index in the matrix. Then is lower triangular and is upper triangular, so is an LU-decomposition of . Finally, is the number of times  occurs as an induced subgraph in . Similarly to the homomorphism vectors we define vectors and . Finally, let be rooted graphs. A homomorphism from  to  is a graph homomorphism that maps the root of  to the root of . Moreover, two rooted graphs are isomorphic if there is an isomorphism mapping the root to the root.

## 3 Homomorphisms from trees

### 3.1 Color refinement and tree unfolding

Color refinement iteratively colors the vertices of a graph in a sequence of refinement rounds. Initially, all vertices get the same color. In each refinement round, any two vertices  and  that still have the same color get different colors if there is some color such that  and  have a different number of neighbors of color ; otherwise they keep the same color. We stop the refinement process if the vertex partition that is induced by the colors does not change anymore, that is, all pairs of vertices that have the same color before the refinement round still have the same color after the round. More formally, we define the sequence of colorings as follows. We let for all , and for we let . We say that color refinement distinguishes two graphs  and  if there is an with

 {{CGi(v):v∈V(G)}}≠{{CHi(v):v∈V(H)}}. (1)

We argue now that the color refinement algorithm implicitly constructs a tree at  obtained by simultaneously taking all possible walks starting at  (and not remembering nodes visited in the past). For a rooted tree  with root , a graph , and a vertex , we say that is a tree at  if there is a homomorphism from to such that and, for all non-leaves , the function  induces a bijection between the set of children of in in and the set of neighbors of  in . In other words, is a homomorphism from  to  that is locally bijective. If  is an infinite tree at  and does not have any leaves, then  is uniquely determined up to isomorphisms, and we call this the infinite tree at  (or the tree unfolding of  at ), denoted with . For an infinite rooted tree , let  be the finite rooted subtree of  where all leaves are at depth exactly . For all finite trees  of depth , define to be the number of vertices  for which  is isomorphic to . Note that this number is zero if not all leaves of  are at the same depth  or if some node of  has more than  children. The -vector of  is the vector , where  denotes the family of all rooted trees. The following connection between the color refinement algorithm and the -vector is known.

[Angluin [2], also see Krebs and Verbitsky [17, Lemma 2.5]] For all graphs and , color refinement distinguishes and if and only if holds.

### 3.2 Proof of Theorem 1

Throughout this section, we work with rooted trees. For a rooted tree and an (unrooted) graph , we simply let be the number of homomorphisms of the plain tree underlying to , ignoring the root.

Let  and be rooted trees. A homomorphism  from to is depth-preserving if, for all vertices , the depth of  in  is equal to the depth of  in . Moreover, a homomorphism  from  to  is depth-surjective if the image of  under  contains vertices at every depth present in . We define  as the number of homomorphisms from  to  that are both depth-preserving and depth-surjective. Note that holds if and only if  and have different depths.

Let be a rooted tree and let be a graph. We have

 Hom(T,G)=∑T′−−−→Hom(T,T′)⋅Cr(T′,G), (2)

where the sum is over all unlabeled rooted trees . In other words, the matrix identity holds.

###### Proof.

Let  be the depth of  and let  be the root of . Every  with has depth  too and there are at most  non-isomorphic rooted trees  of depth  with . Thus the sum in (2) has only finitely many non-zero terms and is well-defined.

For a rooted tree  and a vertex , let be the set of all homomorphisms  from  to  such that holds and the tree unfolding  is isomorphic to . Let and observe . Since is the number of with , we thus have . Since each homomorphism from  to  is contained in exactly one set , we obtain the desired equality (2). ∎

For rooted trees and , let be the number of depth-preserving and surjective homomorphisms from  to . In particular, not only do these homomorphisms have to be depth-surjective, but they should hit every vertex of . For rooted trees and of the same depth, let be the number of subgraphs of  that are isomorphic to  (under an isomorphism that maps the root to the root); if and have different depths, we set .

is an -decomposition of , and and are invertible.

As is the case for finite matrices, the inverse of a lower (upper) triangular matrix is lower (upper) triangular. As the matrix is lower triangular and the matrix is upper triangular, their inverses are as well. We are ready to prove our first main theorem.

###### Proof of Theorem 1.

We only need to prove the equivalence between assertions i and ii. For every graph , let . By our convention that for a rooted tree  and an unrooted graph we let be the number of homomorphisms of the plain tree underlying to , for all and we have . By Lemma 3.1, it suffices to prove for all graph that

 CR(G)=CR(H)⟺HOMr(G)=HOMr(H). (3)

We view the vectors and as infinite column vectors. By Lemma 3.2, we have

 HOMr(G)=−−−→Hom⋅CR(G) and HOMr(H)=−−−→Hom⋅CR(H). (4)

The forward direction of (3) now follows immediately.

It remains to prove the backward direction. Since holds by Lemma 3.2 for two invertible matrices and , we can first left-multiply with to obtain the equivalent identities

 −−→Surj−1⋅HOMr(G)=−−→Sub⋅CR(G) and −−→Surj−1⋅HOMr(H)=−−→Sub⋅CR(H). (5)

Now suppose holds, and set . Then is well-defined, because and its inverse are lower triangular. Thus we obtain and set . Unfortunately, may be undefined, since is upper triangular. While we can still use a matrix inverse, the argument becomes a bit subtle. The crucial observation is that is non-zero for at most  different trees , and all such trees have maximum degree at most . Thus we do not need to look at all trees but only those with maximum degree . Let be the set of all unlabeled rooted trees of maximum degree at most . Let , let , and let . Then we still have the following for all and :

 w′T=∑T′∈˜T−−→Sub′(T,T′)⋅Cr′(T′,G). (6)

The new matrix is a principal minor of  and thus remains invertible. Moreover, is well-defined, since

 ∑T′∈˜T−−→Sub′−1(T,T′)⋅w′T′ (7)

is a finite sum for each : The number of (unlabeled) trees that have the same depth  as  is bounded by a function in  and . Thus . By a similar argument, we obtain . This implies and thus . ∎

## 4 Homomorphisms from cycles and paths

While the arguments we saw in the proof of Theorem 1 are mainly graph-theoretic, the proof of Theorem 1 uses spectral techniques. To introduce the techniques, we first prove a simple, known result already mentioned in the introduction. We call two square matrices co-spectral if they have the same eigenvalues with the same multiplicities, and we call two graphs co-spectral if their adjacency matrices are co-spectral.

###### Proposition (e.g. [25, Lemma 1]).

Let be the class of all cycles (including the degenerate cycle of length , which is just a single vertex). For all graphs and , we have if and only if and are co-spectral.

For the proof, we review a few simple facts from linear algebra. The trace of a square matrix is the sum of the diagonal entries. If the eigenvalues of are , then . Moreover, for each the eigenvalues of the matrix  are , and thus . The following technical lemma encapsulates the fact that the information for all  suffices to reconstruct the spectrum of  with multiplicities. We use the same lemma to prove Theorem 1, but for Proposition 4 a less general version would suffice. Let be two finite sets and let and be two vectors. If the equation

 ∑x∈Xcxxℓ=∑y∈Ydyyℓ (8)

holds for all , then and .

###### Proof.

We prove the claim by induction on . For , the claim is trivially true since both sums in (8) are equal to zero by convention.

Let and let without loss of generality. If , then and we claim that  holds. Clearly (8) for  yields . In particular, holds. Since  is the maximum of  in absolute value, we have  and thus also .

Now suppose that holds. We consider the sequences  and with

 aℓ=1^xℓ⋅∑x∈Xcxxℓandbℓ=1^xℓ⋅∑y∈Ydyyℓ. (9)

Note that holds for all by assumption. Observe the following simple facts:

1. If , then .

2. If , then and .

As well as the following exhaustive case distinction for :

1. If , then .

2. If and , then .

3. If and , then and .

4. If , then and .

If  holds, we see from 1) that  converges to the non-zero value . Since the two sequences are equal, the sequence  also converges to a non-zero value. The only case for  where this happens is b), and we get , , and . On the other hand, if , we see from 2) that

does not converge, but the even and odd subsequences do. The only cases for

where this happens for  too are c) and d). We cannot be in case c), since the two accumulation points of  just differ in their sign, while the two accumulation points of  do not have the same absolute value. Thus we must be in case d) and obtain as well as

 c^x+c−^x=d^x+d−^xandc^x−c−^x=d^x−d−^x.

This linear system has full rank and implies and .

Either way, we can remove or from both  and  and apply the induction hypothesis on the resulting instance . Then  follows as claimed. ∎

###### Proof of Proposition 4.

For all , the number of homomorphisms from the cycle  of length  to a graph with adjacency matrix  is equal to the number of closed length- walks in , which in turn is equal to the trace of . Thus for graphs with adjacency matrices , we have if and only if holds for all .

If  and  have the same spectrum , then holds for all . For the reverse direction, suppose  for all . Let  be the set of eigenvalues of  and for each , let  be the multiplicity of the eigenvalue . Let  and for  be the corresponding eigenvalues and multiplicities for . Then for all , we have

 ∑λ∈Xcλλℓ=tr(Aℓ)=tr(Bℓ)=∑λ∈Ydλλℓ.

By Lemma 4, this implies , that is, the spectra of  and  are identical. ∎

In the following example, we show that the vectors for the class of cycles and for the class of trees are incomparable in their expressiveness.

The graphs and shown in Figure 2 are co-spectral and thus , but it is easy to see that for the class of all paths.

Let be a cycle of length and the disjoint union of two triangles. Then obviously, . However, color refinement does not distinguish and and thus .

Let us now turn to the proof of Theorem 1.

###### Proof of Theorem 1.

Let  and  be the adjacency matrices of  and , respectively. Since  is a symmetric and real matrix, its eigenvalues are real and the corresponding eigenspaces are orthogonal and span . Let  be the -dimensional all- vector, and let  be the set of all eigenvalues of  whose corresponding eigenspaces are not orthogonal to . We call these eigenvalues the useful eigenvalues of  and without loss of generality assume . The -dimensional all- vector

can be expressed as a direct sum of eigenvectors of

corresponding to useful eigenvalues. In particular, there is a unique decomposition such that each  is a non-zero eigenvector in the eigenspace of . Moreover, the vectors  are orthogonal. For the matrix , we analogously define its set of useful eigenvalues  and the direct sum .

We prove the equivalence of the following three assertions (of which the first and third appear in the statement of Theorem 1).

1. .

2. and have the same set of useful eigenvalues  and holds for all . Here,  denotes the Euclidean norm with .

3. The system of linear equations has a real solution.

Note that in 2, we do not require that the useful eigenvalues occur with the same multiplicities in  and . We show the implications (1 2), (2 3), and (3 1).

(1 2): Suppose that holds for all paths . Equivalently, this can be stated in terms of the adjacency matrices and : for all , we have . We claim that  and  have the same useful eigenvalues, and that the projections of  onto the corresponding eigenspaces have the same lengths.

Note that  holds. Thus we have

 (10)

The term can be expanded analogously, which together yields

 k∑i=1∥ui∥2⋅λℓi=k′∑i=1∥vi∥2⋅μℓifor all ℓ∈N. (11)

Since all coefficients and are non-zero, we are in the situation of Lemma 4. We obtain and, for all , we obtain and . This is exactly the claim that we want to show.

(2 3): We claim that the )-matrix  defined via

 X=k∑i=11∥ui∥2⋅uivTi (12)

satisfies the equations and . Indeed, we have

 AX=k∑i=11∥ui∥2⋅AuivTi=k∑i=1λi∥ui∥2⋅uivTi=k∑i=11∥ui∥2⋅uivTiBT=XBT=XB, (13)

This follows, since , , and is symmetric. Moreover, we have

 X1=k∑i=11∥ui∥2⋅AuivTi1=k∑i=11∥ui∥2⋅uivTik∑j=1vj=k∑i=11∥ui∥2⋅ui⋅vTivi=1. (14)

This holds by definition of  and  and from . The claim follows analogously.

(3 1): Suppose there is a matrix  with and . We obtain by induction for all . For , this also holds since by convention. As a result, we have for all . Since these scalars count the length- walks in and , respectively, we obtain for all paths  as claimed. ∎

## 5 Homomorphisms from bounded tree width and path width

We briefly outline the main ideas of the proofs of Theorems 1 and 1; the technical details are deferred to the appendix. In Theorem 1, the equivalence between ii and iii is essentially known, so we focus on the equivalence between i and ii. The proof is similar to the proof of Theorem 1 in Section 3.

Let us fix . The idea of the -WL algorithm is to iteratively color -tuples of vertices. Initially, each -tuple is colored by its atomic type, that is, the isomorphism type of the labeled graph . Then in the refinement step, to define the new color of a -tuple we look at the current color of all -tuples that can be reached from by adding one vertex and then removing one vertex.

Similar to the tree unfolding of a graph at a vertex , we define the Weisfeiler-Leman tree unfolding at a -tuple of vertices. These objects have some resemblance to the pebbling comonad, which was defined by Abramsky, Dawar, and Wang [1] in the language of category theory. The WL-tree unfolding describes the color of