For many algorithmic problems on graphs of treewidth $t$, a standard dynamic programming approach gives an algorithm with time and space complexity $2^{\mathcal{O}(t)}\cdot n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$. It turns out that when one considers the more restrictive parameter treedepth, it is often the case that a variation of this technique can be used to reduce the space complexity to polynomial, while retaining time complexity of the form $2^{\mathcal{O}(d)}\cdot n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$, where $d$ is the treedepth. This transfer of methodology is, however, far from automatic. For instance, for problems with connectivity constraints, standard dynamic programming techniques give algorithms with time and space complexity $2^{\mathcal{O}(t\log t)}\cdot n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$ on graphs of treewidth $t$, but it is not clear how to convert them into time-efficient polynomial space algorithms for graphs of low treedepth.
Cygan et al. (FOCS'11) introduced the Cut&Count technique and showed that a certain class of problems with connectivity constraints can be solved in time and space complexity $2^{\mathcal{O}(t)}\cdot n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$. Recently, Hegerfeld and Kratsch (STACS'20) showed that, for some of those problems, the Cut&Count technique can be also applied in the setting of treedepth, and it gives algorithms with running time $2^{\mathcal{O}(d)}\cdot n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$ and polynomial space usage. However, a number of important problems eluded such a treatment, with the most prominent examples being Hamiltonian Cycle and Longest Path.
In this paper we clarify the situation by showing that Hamiltonian Cycle, Hamiltonian Path, Long Cycle, Long Path, and Min Cycle Cover all admit $5^d\cdot n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$-time and polynomial space algorithms on graphs of treedepth $d$. The algorithms are randomized Monte Carlo with only false negatives.
A breakthrough result of Cygan et al. (FOCS 2011) showed that connectivity problems parameterized by treewidth can be solved much faster than the previously best known time $\mathcal{O}^*(2^{\mathcal{O}(tw \log(tw))})$. Using their inspired Cut\&Count technique, they obtained $\mathcal{O}^*(α^{tw})$ time algorithms for many such problems. Moreover, they proved these running times to be optimal assuming the Strong Exponential-Time Hypothesis. Unfortunately, like other dynamic programming algorithms on tree decompositions, these algorithms also require exponential space, and this is widely belie…
The width measure \emph{treedepth}, also known as vertex ranking, centered coloring and elimination tree height, is a well-established notion which has recently seen a resurgence of interest. We present an algorithm which---given as input an $n$-vertex graph, a tree decomposition of the graph of width $w$, and an integer $t$---decides Treedepth, i.e. whether the treedepth of the graph is at most $t$, in time $2^{O(wt)} \cdot n$. If necessary, a witness structure for the treedepth can be constructed in the same running time. In conjunction with previous results we provide a simple algorithm and…
Solving (mixed) integer linear programs, (M)ILPs for short, is a fundamental optimization task. While hard in general, recent years have brought about vast progress for solving structurally restricted, (non-mixed) ILPs: $n$-fold, tree-fold, 2-stage stochastic and multi-stage stochastic programs admit efficient algorithms, and all of these special cases are subsumed by the class of ILPs of small treedepth. In this paper, we extend this line of work to the mixed case, by showing an algorithm solving MILP in time $f(a,d) \textrm{poly}(n)$, where $a$ is the largest coefficient of the constraint ma…
We study the CONNECTED η-TREEDEPTH DELETION problem where the input instance is an undireted graph G = (V, E) and an integer k. The objective is to decide if G has a set S \subseteq V(G) of at most k vertices such that G - S has treedepth at most ηand G[S] is connected. As this problem naturally generalizes the well-known CONNECTED VERTEX COVER, when parameterized by solution size k, the CONNECTED η-TREEDEPTH DELETION does not admit polynomial kernel unless NP \subseteq coNP/poly. This motivates us to design an approximate kernel of polynomial size for this problem. In this paper, we show that…
The treedepth of a graph $G$ is the least possible depth of an elimination forest of $G$: a rooted forest on the same vertex set where every pair of vertices adjacent in $G$ is bound by the ancestor/descendant relation. We propose an algorithm that given a graph $G$ and an integer $d$, either finds an elimination forest of $G$ of depth at most $d$ or concludes that no such forest exists; thus the algorithm decides whether the treedepth of $G$ is at most $d$. The running time is $2^{O(d^2)}\cdot n^{O(1)}$ and the space usage is polynomial in $n$. Further, by allowing randomization, the time and…
In the last years, kernelization with structural parameters has been an active area of research within the field of parameterized complexity. As a relevant example, Gajarsk{y} et al. [ESA 2013] proved that every graph problem satisfying a property called finite integer index admits a linear kernel on graphs of bounded expansion and an almost linear kernel on nowhere dense graphs, parameterized by the size of a $c$-treedepth modulator, which is a vertex set whose removal results in a graph of treedepth at most $c$, where $c \geq 1$ is a fixed integer. The authors left as further research to inv…
We obtain new parameterized algorithms for the classical problem of determining whether a directed acyclic graph admits an upward planar drawing. Our results include a new fixed-parameter algorithm parameterized by the number of sources, an XP-algorithm parameterized by treewidth, and a fixed-parameter algorithm parameterized by treedepth. All three algorithms are obtained using a novel framework for the problem that combines SPQR tree-decompositions with parameterized techniques. Our approach unifies and pushes beyond previous tractability results for the problem on series-parallel digraphs, …
Graph Burning asks, given a graph $G = (V,E)$ and an integer $k$, whether there exists $(b_{0},\dots,b_{k-1}) \in V^{k}$ such that every vertex in $G$ has distance at most $i$ from some $b_{i}$. This problem is known to be NP-complete even on connected caterpillars of maximum degree $3$. We study the parameterized complexity of this problem and answer all questions arose by Kare and Reddy [IWOCA 2019] about parameterized complexity of the problem. We show that the problem is W[2]-complete parameterized by $k$ and that it does no admit a polynomial kernel parameterized by vertex cover number un…
Treedepth decomposition has several practical applications and can be used to speed up many parameterized algorithms. There are several works aiming to design a scalable algorithm to compute exact treedepth decompositions. Those include works based on a set of all minimal separators. In those algorithms, although a number of minimal separators are enumerated, the minimal separators that are used for an optimal solution are empirically very small. Therefore, analyzing the upper bound on the size of minimal separators is an important problem because it has the potential to significantly reduce t…
The $q$-Coloring problem asks whether the vertices of a graph can be properly colored with $q$ colors. Lokshtanov et al. [SODA 2011] showed that $q$-Coloring on graphs with a feedback vertex set of size $k$ cannot be solved in time $\mathcal{O}^*((q-\varepsilon)^k)$, for any $\varepsilon > 0$, unless the Strong Exponential-Time Hypothesis (SETH) fails. In this paper we perform a fine-grained analysis of the complexity of $q$-Coloring with respect to a hierarchy of parameters. We show that even when parameterized by the vertex cover number, $q$ must appear in the base of the exponent: Unless ET…
Given a graph $G = (V,E)$, a threshold function $t~ :~ V \rightarrow \mathbb{N}$ and an integer $k$, we study the Harmless Set problem, where the goal is to find a subset of vertices $S \subseteq V$ of size at least $k$ such that every vertex $v\in V$ has less than $t(v)$ neighbors in $S$. We enhance our understanding of the problem from the viewpoint of parameterized complexity. Our focus lies on parameters that measure the structural properties of the input instance. We show that the problem is W[1]-hard parameterized by a wide range of fairly restrictive structural parameters such as the fe…
An $h$-queue layout of a graph $G$ consists of a linear order of its vertices and a partition of its edges into $h$ queues, such that no two independent edges of the same queue nest. The minimum $h$ such that $G$ admits an $h$-queue layout is the queue number of $G$. We present two fixed-parameter tractable algorithms that exploit structural properties of graphs to compute optimal queue layouts. As our first result, we show that deciding whether a graph $G$ has queue number $1$ and computing a corresponding layout is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the treedepth of $G$. Our sec…
Integer Linear Programming (ILP) can be seen as the archetypical problem for NP-complete optimization problems, and a wide range of problems in artificial intelligence are solved in practice via a translation to ILP. Despite its huge range of applications, only few tractable fragments of ILP are known, probably the most prominent of which is based on the notion of total unimodularity. Using entirely different techniques, we identify new tractable fragments of ILP by studying structural parameterizations of the constraint matrix within the framework of parameterized complexity. In particular, w…
In the Vertex Planarization problem one asks to delete the minimum possible number of vertices from an input graph to obtain a planar graph. The parameterized complexity of this problem, parameterized by the solution size (the number of deleted vertices) has recently attracted significant attention. The state-of-the-art algorithm of Jansen, Lokshtanov, and Saurabh [SODA 2014] runs in time $2^{O(k \log k)} \cdot n$ on $n$-vertex graph with a solution of size $k$. It remains open if one can obtain a single-exponential dependency on $k$ in the running time bound. One of the core technical contrib…
Grid graphs, and, more generally, $k\times r$ grid graphs, form one of the most basic classes of geometric graphs. Over the past few decades, a large body of works studied the (in)tractability of various computational problems on grid graphs, which often yield substantially faster algorithms than general graphs. Unfortunately, the recognition of a grid graph is particularly hard -- it was shown to be NP-hard even on trees of pathwidth 3 already in 1987. Yet, in this paper, we provide several positive results in this regard in the framework of parameterized complexity (additionally, we present …
We investigate polynomial-time preprocessing for the problem of hitting forbidden minors in a graph, using the framework of kernelization. For a fixed finite set of connected graphs F, the F-Deletion problem is the following: given a graph G and integer k, is it possible to delete k vertices from G to ensure the resulting graph does not contain any graph from F as a minor? Earlier work by Fomin, Lokshtanov, Misra, and Saurabh [FOCS'12] showed that when F contains a planar graph, an instance (G,k) can be reduced in polynomial time to an equivalent one of size $k^{O(1)}$. In this work we focus o…
A defensive alliance in an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ is a non-empty set of vertices $S$ satisfying the condition that every vertex $v\in S$ has at least as many neighbours (including itself) in $S$ as it has in $V\setminus S$. We consider the notion of global minimality in this paper. We are interested in globally minimal defensive alliance of maximum size. This problem is known to be NP-hard but its parameterized complexity remains open until now. We enhance our understanding of the problem from the viewpoint of parameterized complexity by showing that the Globally Minimal Defensive Alliance…
Vertex integrity is a graph parameter that measures the connectivity of a graph. Informally, its meaning is that a graph has small vertex integrity if it has a small separator whose removal disconnects the graph into connected components which are themselves also small. Graphs with low vertex integrity are extremely structured; this renders many hard problems tractable and has recently attracted interest in this notion from the parameterized complexity community. In this paper we revisit the NP-complete problem of computing the vertex integrity of a given graph from the point of view of struct…
We study the parameterized complexity of various classic vertex-deletion problems such as Odd cycle transversal, Vertex planarization, and Chordal vertex deletion under hybrid parameterizations. Existing FPT algorithms for these problems either focus on the parameterization by solution size, detecting solutions of size $k$ in time $f(k) \cdot n^{O(1)}$, or width parameterizations, finding arbitrarily large optimal solutions in time $f(w) \cdot n^{O(1)}$ for some width measure $w$ like treewidth. We unify these lines of research by presenting FPT algorithms for parameterizations that can simult…
In an edge-colored graph, the cost incurred at a vertex on a path when two incident edges with different colors are traversed is called reload or changeover cost. The "Minimum Changeover Cost Arborescence" (MINCCA) problem consists in finding an arborescence with a given root vertex such that the total changeover cost of the internal vertices is minimized. It has been recently proved by Gözüpek et al. [TCS 2016] that the problem is FPT when parameterized by the treewidth and the maximum degree of the input graph. In this article we present the following results for the MINCCA problem: - the pr…
A set $S$ of vertices of a graph is a defensive alliance if, for each element of $S$, the majority of its neighbours are in $S$. We study the parameterized complexity of the Defensive Alliance problem, where the aim is to find a minimum size defensive alliance. Our main results are the following: (1) The Defensive Alliance problem has been studied extensively during the last twenty years, but the question whether it is FPT when parameterized by feedback vertex set has still remained open. We prove that the problem is W[1]-hard parameterized by a wide range of fairly restrictive structural para…
A set $S\subseteq V$ of vertices is an offensive alliance in an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ if each $v\in N(S)$ has at least as many neighbours in $S$ as it has neighbours (including itself) not in $S$. We study the classical and parameterized complexity of the Offensive Alliance problem, where the aim is to find a minimum size offensive alliance. Our focus here lies on natural parameter as well as parameters that measure the structural properties of the input instance. We enhance our understanding of the problem from the viewpoint of parameterized complexity by showing that (1) the problem is …
In this paper, we study the \textsf{Planar Disjoint Paths} problem: Given an undirected planar graph $G$ with $n$ vertices and a set $T$ of $k$ pairs $(s_i,t_i)_{i=1}^k$ of vertices, the goal is to find a set $\mathcal P$ of $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint paths connecting $s_i$ and $t_i$ for all indices $i\in\{1,\ldots,k\}$. We present a $2^{O(k^2)}n$-time algorithm for the \textsf{Planar Disjoint Paths} problem. This improves the two previously best-known algorithms: $2^{2^{O(k)}}n$-time algorithm [Discrete Applied Mathematics 1995] and $2^{O(k^2)}n^6$-time algorithm [STOC 2020].
CNRS, ENS de Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, LIP UMR 5668（法国国家科学研究中心、里昂高等师范学院、克莱贝尔·贝尔纳·里昂大学）；Université Paris Dauphine – PSL, CNRS UMR7243, LAMSADE（巴黎第九大学-PSL大学、法国国家科学研究中心）
We present a data structure that in a dynamic graph of treedepth at most $d$, which is modified over time by edge insertions and deletions, maintains an optimum-height elimination forest. The data structure achieves worst-case update time $2^{{\cal O}(d^2)}$, which matches the best known parameter dependency in the running time of a static fpt algorithm for computing the treedepth of a graph. This improves a result of Dvořák et al. [ESA 2014], who for the same problem achieved update time $f(d)$ for some non-elementary (i.e. tower-exponential) function $f$. As a by-product, we improve known up…
The lower and the upper irredundance numbers of a graph $G$, denoted $ir(G)$ and $IR(G)$ respectively, are conceptually linked to domination and independence numbers and have numerous relations to other graph parameters. It is a long-standing open question whether determining these numbers for a graph $G$ on $n$ vertices admits exact algorithms running in time less than the trivial $Ω(2^n)$ enumeration barrier. We solve these open problems by devising parameterized algorithms for the dual of the natural parameterizations of the problems with running times faster than $O^*(4^{k})$. For example,…
In the Disjoint Paths problem, the input is an undirected graph $G$ on $n$ vertices and a set of $k$ vertex pairs, $\{s_i,t_i\}_{i=1}^k$, and the task is to find $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint paths connecting $s_i$ to $t_i$. The problem was shown to have an $f(k)n^3$ algorithm by Robertson and Seymour. In modern terminology, this means that Disjoint Paths is fixed parameter tractable (FPT), parameterized by the number of vertex pairs. This algorithm is the cornerstone of the entire graph minor theory, and a vital ingredient in the $g(k)n^3$ algorithm for Minor Testing (given two undirected grap…
We introduce a variant of modal logic, dubbed EXISTENTIAL COUNTING MODAL LOGIC (ECML), which captures a vast majority of problems known to be tractable in single exponential time when parameterized by treewidth. It appears that all these results can be subsumed by the theorem that model checking of ECML admits an algorithm with such complexity. We extend ECML by adding connectivity requirements and, using the Cut&Count technique introduced by Cygan et al. [4], prove that problems expressible in the extension are also tractable in single exponential time when parameterized by treewidth; however…
For the vast majority of local graph problems standard dynamic programming techniques give c^tw V^O(1) algorithms, where tw is the treewidth of the input graph. On the other hand, for problems with a global requirement (usually connectivity) the best-known algorithms were naive dynamic programming schemes running in tw^O(tw) V^O(1) time. We breach this gap by introducing a technique we dubbed Cut&Count that allows to produce c^tw V^O(1) Monte Carlo algorithms for most connectivity-type problems, including Hamiltonian Path, Feedback Vertex Set and Connected Dominating Set, consequently answerin…
We present randomized algorithms for some well-studied, hard combinatorial problems: the k-path problem, the p-packing of q-sets problem, and the q-dimensional p-matching problem. Our algorithms solve these problems with high probability in time exponential only in the parameter (k, p, q) and using polynomial space; the constant bases of the exponentials are significantly smaller than in previous works. For example, for the k-path problem the improvement is from 2 to 1.66. We also show how to detect if a d-regular graph admits an edge coloring with $d$ colors in time within a polynomial factor…
The complexity of problems involving global constraints is usually much more difficult to understand than the complexity of problems only involving local constraints. A natural form of global constraints are connectivity constraints. We study connectivity problems from a fine-grained parameterized perspective. In a breakthrough, Cygan et al. (TALG 2022) first obtained algorithms with single-exponential running time c^{tw} n^O(1) for connectivity problems parameterized by treewidth by introducing the cut-and-count-technique. Furthermore, the obtained bases c were shown to be optimal under the S…
Diameter -- the task of computing the length of a longest shortest path -- is a fundamental graph problem. Assuming the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis, there is no $O(n^{1.99})$-time algorithm even in sparse graphs [Roditty and Williams, 2013]. To circumvent this lower bound we aim for algorithms with running time $f(k)(n+m)$ where $k$ is a parameter and $f$ is a function as small as possible. We investigate which parameters allow for such running times. To this end, we systematically explore a hierarchy of structural graph parameters.
For a graph $H$, the $H$-free Edge Deletion problem asks whether there exist at most $k$ edges whose deletion from the input graph $G$ results in a graph without any induced copy of $H$. We prove that $H$-free Edge Deletion is NP-complete if $H$ is a graph with at least two edges and $H$ has a component with maximum number of vertices which is a tree or a regular graph. Furthermore, we obtain that these NP-complete problems cannot be solved in parameterized subexponential time, i.e., in time $2^{o(k)}\cdot |G|^{O(1)}$, unless Exponential Time Hypothesis fails.
In the Connected Vertex Cover problem we are given an undirected graph G together with an integer k and we are to find a subset of vertices X of size at most k, such that X contains at least one end-point of each edge and moreover X induces a connected subgraph. For this problem we present a deterministic algorithm running in O(2^k n^O(1)) time and polynomial space, improving over previously best O(2.4882^k n^O(1)) deterministic algorithm and O(2^k n^O(1)) randomized algorithm. Furthermore, when usage of exponential space is allowed, we present an O(2^k k(n+m)) time algorithm that solves a mor…
We show that there is no $2^{o(k^2)} n^{O(1)}$ time algorithm for Independent Set on $n$-vertex graphs with rank-width $k$, unless the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) fails. Our lower bound matches the $2^{O(k^2)} n^{O(1)}$ time algorithm given by Bui-Xuan, Telle, and Vatshelle [Discret. Appl. Math., 2010] and it answers the open question of Bergougnoux and Kanté [SIAM J. Discret. Math., 2021]. We also show that the known $2^{O(k^2)} n^{O(1)}$ time algorithms for Weighted Dominating Set, Maximum Induced Matching and Feedback Vertex Set parameterized by rank-width $k$ are optimal assuming ETH…
