  Following the groundbreaking Moser-Tardos algorithm for the Lovasz Local
Lemma (LLL), a series of works have exploited a key ingredient of the original
analysis, the witness tree lemma, in order to: derive deterministic, parallel
and distributed algorithms for the LLL, to estimate the entropy of the output
distribution, to partially avoid bad events, to deal with super-polynomially
many bad events, and even to devise new algorithmic frameworks. Meanwhile, a
parallel line of work, has established tools for analyzing stochastic local
search algorithms motivated by the LLL that do not fall within the Moser-Tardos
framework. Unfortunately, the aforementioned results do not transfer to these
more general settings. Mainly, this is because the witness tree lemma,
provably, no longer holds. Here we prove that for commutative algorithms, a
class recently introduced by Kolmogorov and which captures the vast majority of
LLL applications, the witness tree lemma does hold. Armed with this fact, we
extend the main result of Haeupler, Saha, and Srinivasan to commutative
algorithms, establishing that the output of such algorithms well-approximates
the LLL-distribution, i.e., the distribution obtained by conditioning on all
bad events being avoided, and give several new applications. For example, we
show that the recent algorithm of Molloy for list coloring number of sparse,
triangle-free graphs can output exponential many list colorings of the input
graph.
