Let $G$ be an unweighted, undirected graph. An additive $k$-spanner of $G$ is a subgraph $H$ that approximates all distances between pairs of nodes up to an additive error of $+k$, that is, it satisfies $d_H(u,v) \le d_G(u,v)+k$ for all nodes $u,v$, where $d$ is the shortest path distance. We give a deterministic algorithm that constructs an additive $O\!\left(1\right)$-spanner with $O\!\left(n^{4/3}\right)$ edges in $O\!\left(n^2\right)$ time. This should be compared with the randomized Monte Carlo algorithm by Woodruff [ICALP 2010] giving an additive $6$-spanner with $O\!\left(n^{4/3}\log^3 n\right)$ edges in expected time $O\!\left(n^2\log^2 n\right)$.
An $(α,β)$-approximate distance oracle for $G$ is a data structure that supports the following distance queries between pairs of nodes in $G$. Given two nodes $u$, $v$ it can in constant time compute a distance estimate $\tilde{d}$ that satisfies $d \le \tilde{d} \le αd + β$ where $d$ is the distance between $u$ and $v$ in $G$. Sommer [ICALP 2016] gave a randomized Monte Carlo $(2,1)$-distance oracle of size $O\!\left(n^{5/3}\text{poly} \log n\right)$ in expected time $O\!\left(n^2\text{poly} \log n\right)$. As an application of the additive $O(1)$-spanner we improve the construction by Sommer [ICALP 2016] and give a Las Vegas $(2,1)$-distance oracle of size $O\!\left(n^{5/3}\right)$ in time $O\!\left(n^2\right)$. This also implies an algorithm that in $O\!\left(n^2\right)$ gives approximate distance for all pairs of nodes in $G$ improving on the $O\!\left(n^2 \log n\right)$ algorithm by Baswana and Kavitha [SICOMP 2010].
We consider additive spanners of unweighted undirected graphs. Let $G$ be a graph and $H$ a subgraph of $G$. The most naïve way to construct an additive $k$-spanner of $G$ is the following: As long as $H$ is not an additive $k$-spanner repeat: Find a pair $(u,v) \in H$ that violates the spanner-condition and a shortest path from $u$ to $v$ in $G$. Add the edges of this path to $H$. We show that, with a very simple initial graph $H$, this naïve method gives additive $6$- and $2$-spanners of sizes matching the best known upper bounds. For additive $2$-spanners we start with $H=\emptyset$ and end…
For a positive integer $t$ and a graph $G$, an additive $t$-spanner of $G$ is a spanning subgraph in which the distance between every pair of vertices is at most the original distance plus $t$. Minimum Additive $t$-Spanner Problem is to find an additive $t$-spanner with the minimum number of edges in a given graph, which is known to be NP-hard. Since we need to care about global properties of graphs when we deal with additive $t$-spanners, Minimum Additive $t$-Spanner Problem is hard to handle, and hence only few results are known for it. In this paper, we study Minimum Additive $t$-Spanner Pr…
Let $G$ be an unweighted $n$-node undirected graph. A \emph{$β$-additive spanner} of $G$ is a spanning subgraph $H$ of $G$ such that distances in $H$ are stretched at most by an additive term $β$ w.r.t. the corresponding distances in $G$. A natural research goal related with spanners is that of designing \emph{sparse} spanners with \emph{low} stretch. In this paper, we focus on \emph{fault-tolerant} additive spanners, namely additive spanners which are able to preserve their additive stretch even when one edge fails. We are able to improve all known such spanners, in terms of either sparsity o…
A {\em fault-tolerant} structure for a network is required to continue functioning following the failure of some of the network's edges or vertices. In this paper, we address the problem of designing a {\em fault-tolerant} additive spanner, namely, a subgraph $H$ of the network $G$ such that subsequent to the failure of a single vertex, the surviving part of $H$ still contains an \emph{additive} spanner for (the surviving part of) $G$, satisfying $dist(s,t,H\setminus \{v\}) \leq dist(s,t,G\setminus \{v\})+β$ for every $s,t,v \in V$. Recently, the problem of constructing fault-tolerant additive…
Graph spanners and emulators are sparse structures that approximately preserve distances of the original graph. While there has been an extensive amount of work on additive spanners, so far little attention was given to weighted graphs. Only very recently [ABSKS20] extended the classical +2 (respectively, +4) spanners for unweighted graphs of size $O(n^{3/2})$ (resp., $O(n^{7/5})$) to the weighted setting, where the additive error is $+2W$ (resp., $+4W$). This means that for every pair $u,v$, the additive stretch is at most $+2W_{u,v}$, where $W_{u,v}$ is the maximal edge weight on the shortes…
A $k$-additive spanner of a graph is a subgraph that preserves the distance between any two nodes up to a total additive error of $+k$. Efficient algorithms have been devised for constructing 2 [Aingworth et al. SIAM '99], 6 [Baswana et al. ACM '10, Woodruff ICALP '13], and 8-additive spanners [Knudsen '17], but no efficient algorithms for 4-additive spanners have yet been discovered. In this paper we present a modification of Chechik's 4-additive spanner construction [Chechik SODA '13] that produces a 4-additive spanner on $\Oish(n^{7/5})$ edges, with an improved runtime of $\Oish(mn^{3/5})$ …
Consider an undirected weighted graph G=(V,E) with |V|=n and |E|=m, where each vertex v is assigned a label from a set L of \ell labels. We show how to construct a compact distance oracle that can answer queries of the form: "what is the distance from v to the closest lambda-labeled node" for a given node v in V and label lambda in L. This problem was introduced by Hermelin, Levy, Weimann and Yuster [ICALP 2011] where they present several results for this problem. In the first result, they show how to construct a vertex-label distance oracle of expected size O(kn^{1+1/k}) with stretch (4k - 5)…
It was recently found that there are very close connections between the existence of additive spanners (subgraphs where all distances are preserved up to an additive stretch), distance preservers (subgraphs in which demand pairs have their distance preserved exactly), and pairwise spanners (subgraphs in which demand pairs have their distance preserved up to a multiplicative or additive stretch) [Abboud-Godwin SODA '16, Godwin-Williams SODA '16]. We study these problems from an optimization point of view, where rather than studying the existence of extremal instances we are given an instance an…
A spanner is a sparse subgraph that approximately preserves the pairwise distances of the original graph. It is well known that there is a smooth tradeoff between the sparsity of a spanner and the quality of its approximation, so long as distance error is measured multiplicatively. A central open question in the field is to prove or disprove whether such a tradeoff exists also in the regime of \emph{additive} error. That is, is it true that for all $\varepsilon>0$, there is a constant $k_{\varepsilon}$ such that every graph has a spanner on $O(n^{1+\varepsilon})$ edges that preserves its pairw…
For an input graph $G$, an additive spanner is a sparse subgraph $H$ whose shortest paths match those of $G$ up to small additive error. We prove two new lower bounds in the area of additive spanners: 1) We construct $n$-node graphs $G$ for which any spanner on $O(n)$ edges must increase a pairwise distance by $+Ω(n^{1/7})$. This improves on a recent lower bound of $+Ω(n^{1/10.5})$ by Lu, Wein, Vassilevska Williams, and Xu [SODA '22]. 2) A classic result by Coppersmith and Elkin [SODA '05] proves that for any $n$-node graph $G$ and set of $p = O(n^{1/2})$ demand pairs, one can exactly preserve…
We study two popular ways to sketch the shortest path distances of an input graph. The first is distance preservers, which are sparse subgraphs that agree with the distances of the original graph on a given set of demand pairs. Prior work on distance preservers has exploited only a simple structural property of shortest paths, called consistency, stating that one can break shortest path ties such that no two paths intersect, split apart, and then intersect again later. We prove that consistency alone is not enough to understand distance preservers, by showing both a lower bound on the power of…
We study two popular ways to sketch the shortest path distances of an input graph. The first is distance preservers, which are sparse subgraphs that agree with the distances of the original graph on a given set of demand pairs. Prior work on distance preservers has exploited only a simple structural property of shortest paths, called consistency, stating that one can break shortest path ties such that no two paths intersect, split apart, and then intersect again later. We prove that consistency alone is not enough to understand distance preservers, by showing both a lower bound on the power of…
In this paper, we study collective additive tree spanners for families of graphs enjoying special Robertson-Seymour's tree-decompositions, and demonstrate interesting consequences of obtained results. We say that a graph $G$ {\em admits a system of $μ$ collective additive tree $r$-spanners} (resp., {\em multiplicative tree $t$-spanners}) if there is a system $\cT(G)$ of at most $μ$ spanning trees of $G$ such that for any two vertices $x,y$ of $G$ a spanning tree $T\in \cT(G)$ exists such that $d_T(x,y)\leq d_G(x,y)+r$ (resp., $d_T(x,y)\leq t\cdot d_G(x,y)$). When $μ=1$ one gets the notion of {…
Spanners are fundamental graph structures that sparsify graphs at the cost of small stretch. In particular, in recent years, many sequential algorithms constructing additive all-pairs spanners were designed, providing very sparse small-stretch subgraphs. Remarkably, it was then shown that the known (+6)-spanner constructions are essentially the sparsest possible, that is, a larger additive stretch cannot guarantee a sparser spanner, which brought the stretch-sparsity trade-off to its limit. Distributed constructions of spanners are also abundant. However, for additive spanners, while there wer…
Maintaining and updating shortest paths information in a graph is a fundamental problem with many applications. As computations on dense graphs can be prohibitively expensive, and it is preferable to perform the computations on a sparse skeleton of the given graph that roughly preserves the shortest paths information. Spanners and emulators serve this purpose. This paper develops fast dynamic algorithms for sparse spanner and emulator maintenance and provides evidence from fine-grained complexity that these algorithms are tight. Under the popular OMv conjecture, we show that there can be no de…
We prove better lower bounds on additive spanners and emulators, which are lossy compression schemes for undirected graphs, as well as lower bounds on shortcut sets, which reduce the diameter of directed graphs. We show that any $O(n)$-size shortcut set cannot bring the diameter below $Ω(n^{1/6})$, and that any $O(m)$-size shortcut set cannot bring it below $Ω(n^{1/11})$. These improve Hesse's [Hesse03] lower bound of $Ω(n^{1/17})$. By combining these constructions with Abboud and Bodwin's [AbboudB17] edge-splitting technique, we get additive stretch lower bounds of $+Ω(n^{1/11})$ for $O(n)$-s…
This paper studies the complexity of distributed construction of purely additive spanners in the CONGEST model. We describe algorithms for building such spanners in several cases. Because of the need to simultaneously make decisions at far apart locations, the algorithms use additional mechanisms compared to their sequential counterparts. We complement our algorithms with a lower bound on the number of rounds required for computing pairwise spanners. The standard reductions from set-disjointness and equality seem unsuitable for this task because no specific edge needs to be removed from the gr…
Given an {\em unweighted} undirected graph $G = (V,E)$, and a pair of parameters $ε> 0$, $β= 1,2,\ldots$, a subgraph $G' =(V,H)$, $H \subseteq E$, of $G$ is a {\em $(1+ε,β)$-spanner} (aka, a {\em near-additive spanner}) of $G$ if for every $u,v \in V$, $$d_{G'}(u,v) \le (1+ε)d_G(u,v) + β~.$$ It was shown in \cite{EP01} that for any $n$-vertex $G$ as above, and any $ε> 0$ and $κ= 1,2,\ldots$, there exists a $(1+ε,β)$-spanner $G'$ with $O_{ε,κ}(n^{1+1/κ})$ edges, with $$β= β_{EP} = \left({{\log κ} \over ε}\right)^{\log κ- 2}~.$$ This bound remains state-of-the-art, and its dependence on $ε$ (for…
A \emph{spanner} of a graph $G$ is a subgraph $H$ that approximately preserves shortest path distances in $G$. Spanners are commonly applied to compress computation on metric spaces corresponding to weighted input graphs. Classic spanner constructions can seamlessly handle edge weights, so long as error is measured \emph{multiplicatively}. In this work, we investigate whether one can similarly extend constructions of spanners with purely \emph{additive} error to weighted graphs. These extensions are not immediate, due to a key lemma about the size of shortest path neighborhoods that fails for …
Graph spanners are sparse subgraphs that faithfully preserve the distances in the original graph up to small stretch. Spanner have been studied extensively as they have a wide range of applications ranging from distance oracles, labeling schemes and routing to solving linear systems and spectral sparsification. A $k$-spanner maintains pairwise distances up to multiplicative factor of $k$. It is a folklore that for every $n$-vertex graph $G$, one can construct a $(2k-1)$ spanner with $O(n^{1+1/k})$ edges. In a distributed setting, such spanners can be constructed in the standard CONGEST model u…
Spanners, emulators, and approximate distance oracles can be viewed as lossy compression schemes that represent an unweighted graph metric in small space, say $\tilde{O}(n^{1+δ})$ bits. There is an inherent tradeoff between the sparsity parameter $δ$ and the stretch function $f$ of the compression scheme, but the qualitative nature of this tradeoff has remained a persistent open problem. In this paper we show that the recent additive spanner lower bound of Abboud and Bodwin is just the first step in a hierarchy of lower bounds that fully characterize the asymptotic behavior of the optimal stre…
Preservers and additive spanners are sparse (hence cheap to store) subgraphs that preserve the distances between given pairs of nodes exactly or with some small additive error, respectively. Since real-world networks are prone to failures, it makes sense to study fault-tolerant versions of the above structures. This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult task. For every small but arbitrary set of edge or vertex failures, the preservers and spanners need to contain {\em replacement paths} around the faulted set. In this paper we make substantial progress on fault tolerant preservers and addit…
Graph spanners are well-studied and widely used both in theory and practice. In a recent breakthrough, Chechik and Wulff-Nilsen [CW18] improved the state-of-the-art for light spanners by constructing a $(2k-1)(1+ε)$-spanner with $O(n^{1+1/k})$ edges and $O_ε(n^{1/k})$ lightness. Soon after, Filtser and Solomon [FS19] showed that the classic greedy spanner construction achieves the same bounds The major drawback of the greedy spanner is its running time of $O(mn^{1+1/k})$ (which is faster than [CW16]). This makes the construction impractical even for graphs of moderate size. Much faster spanner…
The girth of a graph, i.e. the length of its shortest cycle, is a fundamental graph parameter. Unfortunately all known algorithms for computing, even approximately, the girth and girth-related structures in directed weighted $m$-edge and $n$-node graphs require $Ω(\min\{n^ω, mn\})$ time (for $2\leqω<2.373$). In this paper, we drastically improve these runtimes as follows: * Multiplicative Approximations in Nearly Linear Time: We give an algorithm that in $\widetilde{O}(m)$ time computes an $\widetilde{O}(1)$-multiplicative approximation of the girth as well as an $\widetilde{O}(1)$-multiplicat…
In 2001 Thorup and Zwick devised a distance oracle, which given an $n$-vertex undirected graph and a parameter $k$, has size $O(k n^{1+1/k})$. Upon a query $(u,v)$ their oracle constructs a $(2k-1)$-approximate path $Π$ between $u$ and $v$. The query time of the Thorup-Zwick's oracle is $O(k)$, and it was subsequently improved to $O(1)$ by Chechik. A major drawback of the oracle of Thorup and Zwick is that its space is $Ω(n \cdot \log n)$. Mendel and Naor devised an oracle with space $O(n^{1+1/k})$ and stretch $O(k)$, but their oracle can only report distance estimates and not actual paths. In…
Near-additive (aka $(1+ε,β)$-) emulators and spanners are a fundamental graph-algorithmic construct, with numerous applications for computing approximate shortest paths and related problems in distributed, streaming and dynamic settings. Known constructions of near-additive emulators enable one to trade between their sparsity (i.e., number of edges) and the additive stretch $β$. Specifically, for any pair of parameters $ε>0$, $ κ=1,2,\dots$, one can have a $(1+ε,β)$-emulator with $O(n^{1+1/κ})$ edges, with $β= \left(\frac{\log κ}ε\right)^{\log κ}$. At their sparsest, these emulators employ $c\…
A temporal graph is an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ along with a function that assigns a time-label to each edge in $E$. A path in $G$ with non-decreasing time-labels is called temporal path and the distance from $u$ to $v$ is the minimum length (i.e., the number of edges) of a temporal path from $u$ to $v$. A temporal $α$-spanner of $G$ is a (temporal) subgraph $H$ that preserves the distances between any pair of vertices in $V$, up to a multiplicative stretch factor of $α$. The size of $H$ is the number of its edges. In this work we study the size-stretch trade-offs of temporal spanners. We sh…
Succinct representations of a graph have been objects of central study in computer science for decades. In this paper, we study the operation called \emph{Distance Preserving Graph Contractions}, which was introduced by Bernstein et al. (ITCS, 2018). This operation gives a minor as a succinct representation of a graph that preserves all the distances of the original (up to some factor). The graph minor given from contractions can be seen as a dual of spanners as the distances can only shrink (while distances are stretched in the case of spanners). Bernstein et al. proved inapproximability resu…
We provide a decremental approximate Distance Oracle that obtains stretch of $1+ε$ multiplicative and 2 additive and has $\hat{O}(n^{5/2})$ total cost (where $\hat{O}$ notation suppresses polylogarithmic and $n^{O(1)/\sqrt{n}}$ factors). The best previous results with $\hat{O}(n^{5/2})$ total cost obtained stretch $3+ε$.
Given a metric space $(X,d)$, a set of terminals $K\subseteq X$, and a parameter $t\ge 1$, we consider metric structures (e.g., spanners, distance oracles, embedding into normed spaces) that preserve distances for all pairs in $K\times X$ up to a factor of $t$, and have small size (e.g. number of edges for spanners, dimension for embeddings). While such terminal (aka source-wise) metric structures are known to exist in several settings, no terminal spanner or embedding with distortion close to 1, i.e., $t=1+ε$ for some small $0<ε<1$, is currently known. Here we devise such terminal metric stru…
In this paper we show that set-intersection is harder than distance oracle on sparse graphs. Given a collection of total size n which consists of m sets drawn from universe U, the set-intersection problem is to build a data structure which can answer whether two sets have any intersection. A distance oracle is a data structure which can answer distance queries on a given graph. We show that if one can build distance oracle for sparse graph G=(V,E), which requires s(|V|,|E|) space and answers a (2-ε,c)-approximate distance query in time t(|V|,|E|) where (2-ε) is a multiplicative error and c is …
Consider the family of bounded degree graphs in any minor-closed family (such as planar graphs). Let d be the degree bound and n be the number of vertices of such a graph. Graphs in these classes have hyperfinite decompositions, where, for a sufficiently small \e > 0, one removes \edn edges to get connected components of size independent of n. An important tool for sublinear algorithms and property testing for such classes is the partition oracle, introduced by the seminal work of Hassidim-Kelner-Nguyen-Onak (FOCS 2009). A partition oracle is a local procedure that gives consistent access to a…
We combine ideas from distance sensitivity oracles (DSOs) and fixed-parameter tractability (FPT) to design sensitivity oracles for FPT graph problems. An oracle with sensitivity $f$ for an FPT problem $Π$ on a graph $G$ with parameter $k$ preprocesses $G$ in time $O(g(f,k) \cdot \textsf{poly}(n))$. When queried with a set $F$ of at most $f$ edges of $G$, the oracle reports the answer to the $Π$-with the same parameter $k$-on the graph $G-F$, i.e., $G$ deprived of $F$. The oracle should answer queries in a time that is significantly faster than merely running the best-known FPT algorithm on $G-…
Partitioning oracles were introduced by Hassidim et al. (FOCS 2009) as a generic tool for constant-time algorithms. For any epsilon > 0, a partitioning oracle provides query access to a fixed partition of the input bounded-degree minor-free graph, in which every component has size poly(1/epsilon), and the number of edges removed is at most epsilon*n, where n is the number of vertices in the graph. However, the oracle of Hassidimet al. makes an exponential number of queries to the input graph to answer every query about the partition. In this paper, we construct an efficient partitioning oracle…
Let $s$ denote a distinguished source vertex of a non-negatively real weighted and undirected graph $G$ with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges. In this paper we present two efficient \emph{single-source approximate-distance sensitivity oracles}, namely \emph{compact} data structures which are able to \emph{quickly} report an approximate (by a multiplicative stretch factor) distance from $s$ to any node of $G$ following the failure of any edge in $G$. More precisely, we first present a sensitivity oracle of size $O(n)$ which is able to report 2-approximate distances from the source in $O(1)$ time. The…
Let $G=(V,E,w)$ be a weighted undirected graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, and fix a set of $s$ sources $S\subseteq V$. We study the problem of computing {\em almost shortest paths} (ASP) for all pairs in $S \times V$ in both classical centralized and parallel (PRAM) models of computation. Consider the regime of multiplicative approximation of $1+ε$, for an arbitrarily small constant $ε> 0$ . In this regime existing centralized algorithms require $Ω(\min\{|E|s,n^ω\})$ time, where $ω< 2.372$ is the matrix multiplication exponent. Existing PRAM algorithms with polylogarithmic depth (aka tim…
Many graph processing algorithms require determination of shortest-path distances between arbitrary numbers of node pairs. Since computation of exact distances between all node-pairs of a large graph, e.g., 10M nodes and up, is prohibitively expensive both in computational time and storage space, distance approximation is often used in place of exact computation. In this paper, we present a novel and scalable distance oracle that leverages the hyperbolic core of real-world large graphs for fast and scalable distance approximation. We show empirically that the proposed oracle significantly outp…
We present an algorithm for approximating the edit distance between two strings of length $n$ in time $n^{1+\varepsilon}$ up to a constant factor, for any $\varepsilon>0$. Our result completes a research direction set forth in the recent breakthrough paper [Chakraborty-Das-Goldenberg-Koucky-Saks, FOCS'18], which showed the first constant-factor approximation algorithm with a (strongly) sub-quadratic running time. The recent results of [Koucky-Saks, STOC'20] and [Brakensiek-Rubinstein, STOC'20] have shown near-linear time algorithms that obtain an additive approximation, near-linear in $n$ (equ…
We study the problem of coalitional manipulation---where $k$ manipulators try to manipulate an election on $m$ candidates---under general scoring rules, with a focus on the Borda protocol. We do so both in the weighted and unweighted settings. We focus on minimizing the maximum score obtainable by a non-preferred candidate. In the strongest, most general setting, we provide an algorithm for any scoring rule as described by a vector $\vecα=(α_1,\ldots,α_m)$: for some $β=O(\sqrt{m\log m})$, it obtains an additive approximation equal to $W\cdot \max_i \lvert α_{i+β}-α_i \rvert$, where $W$ is the …
We consider how to assign labels to any undirected graph with n nodes such that, given the labels of two nodes and no other information regarding the graph, it is possible to determine the distance between the two nodes. The challenge in such a distance labeling scheme is primarily to minimize the maximum label lenght and secondarily to minimize the time needed to answer distance queries (decoding). Previous schemes have offered different trade-offs between label lengths and query time. This paper presents a simple algorithm with shorter labels and shorter query time than any previous solution…
