“…The more homogeneous the degrees are, the more cancellation c −1 n could deal on b n and weaker assumption is needed. One possible remedy for networks with well-clustered node degree sequences, one can estimate for subnetworks consisting of high-and low-degree nodes, respectively, exactly similar to a classical strategy for community detection in sparse networks that simply eliminates high-degree nodes (Jing et al, 2021). But considering many real-world networks, such as those we present in Section 5, do not have very high degree hubs (namely, we can think c −1 n 1), but they have rather continuous degree distribution, the result in Theorem 1's type might be more meaningful than one for the aforementioned divide-and-conquer strategy.…”