The scaling limits of the Minimal Spanning Tree and Invasion Percolation in the plane

We prove that the Minimal Spanning Tree and the Invasion Percolation Tree on a version of the triangular lattice in the complex plane have unique scaling limits, which are invariant under rotations, scalings, and, in the case of the MST, also under translations. However, they are not expected to be conformally invariant. We also prove some geometric properties of the limiting MST. The topology of convergence is the space of spanning trees introduced by Aizenman, Burchard, Newman & Wilson (1999), and the proof relies on the existence and conformal covariance of the scaling limit of the near-critical percolation ensemble, established in our earlier works.Comment: 56 pages, 21 figures. A thoroughly revised versio

Travelling on Graphs with Small Highway Dimension

We study the Travelling Salesperson (TSP) and the Steiner Tree problem (STP) in graphs of low highway dimension. This graph parameter was introduced by Abraham et al. [SODA 2010] as a model for transportation networks, on which TSP and STP naturally occur for various applications in logistics. It was previously shown [Feldmann et al. ICALP 2015] that these problems admit a quasi-polynomial time approximation scheme (QPTAS) on graphs of constant highway dimension. We demonstrate that a significant improvement is possible in the special case when the highway dimension is 1, for which we present a fully-polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS). We also prove that STP is weakly NP-hard for these restricted graphs. For TSP we show NP-hardness for graphs of highway dimension 6, which answers an open problem posed in [Feldmann et al. ICALP 2015]

Parameterized Approximation Algorithms for Bidirected Steiner Network Problems

The Directed Steiner Network (DSN) problem takes as input a directed edge-weighted graph $G=(V,E)$ and a set $\mathcal{D}\subseteq V\times V$ of $k$ demand pairs. The aim is to compute the cheapest network $N\subseteq G$ for which there is an $s\to t$ path for each $(s,t)\in\mathcal{D}$. It is known that this problem is notoriously hard as there is no $k^{1/4-o(1)}$-approximation algorithm under Gap-ETH, even when parametrizing the runtime by $k$ [Dinur & Manurangsi, ITCS 2018]. In light of this, we systematically study several special cases of DSN and determine their parameterized approximability for the parameter $k$. For the bi-DSN$_\text{Planar}$ problem, the aim is to compute a planar optimum solution $N\subseteq G$ in a bidirected graph $G$, i.e., for every edge $uv$ of $G$ the reverse edge $vu$ exists and has the same weight. This problem is a generalization of several well-studied special cases. Our main result is that this problem admits a parameterized approximation scheme (PAS) for $k$. We also prove that our result is tight in the sense that (a) the runtime of our PAS cannot be significantly improved, and (b) it is unlikely that a PAS exists for any generalization of bi-DSN$_\text{Planar}$, unless FPT=W[1]. One important special case of DSN is the Strongly Connected Steiner Subgraph (SCSS) problem, for which the solution network $N\subseteq G$ needs to strongly connect a given set of $k$ terminals. It has been observed before that for SCSS a parameterized $2$-approximation exists when parameterized by $k$ [Chitnis et al., IPEC 2013]. We give a tight inapproximability result by showing that for $k$ no parameterized $(2-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm exists under Gap-ETH. Additionally we show that when restricting the input of SCSS to bidirected graphs, the problem remains NP-hard but becomes FPT for $k$

Low-Congestion Shortcut and Graph Parameters

Distributed graph algorithms in the standard CONGEST model often exhibit the time-complexity lower bound of Omega~(sqrt{n} + D) rounds for many global problems, where n is the number of nodes and D is the diameter of the input graph. Since such a lower bound is derived from special "hard-core" instances, it does not necessarily apply to specific popular graph classes such as planar graphs. The concept of low-congestion shortcuts is initiated by Ghaffari and Haeupler [SODA2016] for addressing the design of CONGEST algorithms running fast in restricted network topologies. Specifically, given a specific graph class X, an f-round algorithm of constructing shortcuts of quality q for any instance in X results in O~(q + f)-round algorithms of solving several fundamental graph problems such as minimum spanning tree and minimum cut, for X. The main interest on this line is to identify the graph classes allowing the shortcuts which are efficient in the sense of breaking O~(sqrt{n}+D)-round general lower bounds. In this paper, we consider the relationship between the quality of low-congestion shortcuts and three major graph parameters, chordality, diameter, and clique-width. The main contribution of the paper is threefold: (1) We show an O(1)-round algorithm which constructs a low-congestion shortcut with quality O(kD) for any k-chordal graph, and prove that the quality and running time of this construction is nearly optimal up to polylogarithmic factors. (2) We present two algorithms, each of which constructs a low-congestion shortcut with quality O~(n^{1/4}) in O~(n^{1/4}) rounds for graphs of D=3, and that with quality O~(n^{1/3}) in O~(n^{1/3}) rounds for graphs of D=4 respectively. These results obviously deduce two MST algorithms running in O~(n^{1/4}) and O~(n^{1/3}) rounds for D=3 and 4 respectively, which almost close the long-standing complexity gap of the MST construction in small-diameter graphs originally posed by Lotker et al. [Distributed Computing 2006]. (3) We show that bounding clique-width does not help the construction of good shortcuts by presenting a network topology of clique-width six where the construction of MST is as expensive as the general case