Commensurating endomorphisms of acylindrically hyperbolic groups and applications

We prove that the outer automorphism group Out(G) is residually finite when the group G is virtually compact special (in the sense of Haglund and Wise) or when G is isomorphic to the fundamental group of some compact 3-manifold. To prove these results we characterize commensurating endomorphisms of acylindrically hyperbolic groups. An endomorphism phi of a group G is said to be commensurating, if for every g is an element of G some non-zero power of phi(g) is conjugate to a non-zero power of g. Given an acylindrically hyperbolic group G, we show that any commensurating endomorphism of G is inner modulo a small perturbation. This generalizes a theorem of Minasyan and Osin, which provided a similar statement in the case when G is relatively hyperbolic. We then use this result to study pointwise inner and normal endomorphisms of acylindrically hyperbolic groups.