We introduce clique-guarded first-order logic with counting (cgFOC), a fragment of the first-order logic with counting FOC [Kuske and Schweikardt, LICS 2017], and we study the complexity of this fragment. In particular, we prove computable upper bounds on the Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension of cgFOC formulas and on the graph dimension of cgFOC counting terms on nowhere dense classes of relational structures. Furthermore, we show algorithmic metatheorems for cgFOC for query answering, enumeration, and probably approximately correct (PAC) learning for Boolean and multiclass classification problems on classes of locally bounded expansion. On the other hand, we show that a slight extension of cgFOC is already intractable on trees.

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