648 research outputs found
Lower Bounds for the Graph Homomorphism Problem
The graph homomorphism problem (HOM) asks whether the vertices of a given
-vertex graph can be mapped to the vertices of a given -vertex graph
such that each edge of is mapped to an edge of . The problem
generalizes the graph coloring problem and at the same time can be viewed as a
special case of the -CSP problem. In this paper, we prove several lower
bound for HOM under the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) assumption. The main
result is a lower bound .
This rules out the existence of a single-exponential algorithm and shows that
the trivial upper bound is almost asymptotically
tight.
We also investigate what properties of graphs and make it difficult
to solve HOM. An easy observation is that an upper
bound can be improved to where
is the minimum size of a vertex cover of . The second
lower bound shows that the upper bound is
asymptotically tight. As to the properties of the "right-hand side" graph ,
it is known that HOM can be solved in time and
where is the maximum degree of
and is the treewidth of . This gives
single-exponential algorithms for graphs of bounded maximum degree or bounded
treewidth. Since the chromatic number does not exceed
and , it is natural to ask whether similar
upper bounds with respect to can be obtained. We provide a negative
answer to this question by establishing a lower bound for any
function . We also observe that similar lower bounds can be obtained for
locally injective homomorphisms.Comment: 19 page
On retracts, absolute retracts, and folds in cographs
Let G and H be two cographs. We show that the problem to determine whether H
is a retract of G is NP-complete. We show that this problem is fixed-parameter
tractable when parameterized by the size of H. When restricted to the class of
threshold graphs or to the class of trivially perfect graphs, the problem
becomes tractable in polynomial time. The problem is also soluble when one
cograph is given as an induced subgraph of the other. We characterize absolute
retracts of cographs.Comment: 15 page
Querying the Guarded Fragment
Evaluating a Boolean conjunctive query Q against a guarded first-order theory
F is equivalent to checking whether "F and not Q" is unsatisfiable. This
problem is relevant to the areas of database theory and description logic.
Since Q may not be guarded, well known results about the decidability,
complexity, and finite-model property of the guarded fragment do not obviously
carry over to conjunctive query answering over guarded theories, and had been
left open in general. By investigating finite guarded bisimilar covers of
hypergraphs and relational structures, and by substantially generalising
Rosati's finite chase, we prove for guarded theories F and (unions of)
conjunctive queries Q that (i) Q is true in each model of F iff Q is true in
each finite model of F and (ii) determining whether F implies Q is
2EXPTIME-complete. We further show the following results: (iii) the existence
of polynomial-size conformal covers of arbitrary hypergraphs; (iv) a new proof
of the finite model property of the clique-guarded fragment; (v) the small
model property of the guarded fragment with optimal bounds; (vi) a
polynomial-time solution to the canonisation problem modulo guarded
bisimulation, which yields (vii) a capturing result for guarded bisimulation
invariant PTIME.Comment: This is an improved and extended version of the paper of the same
title presented at LICS 201
The HOM problem is EXPTIME-complete
We define a new class of tree automata with constraints and prove decidability of the emptiness problem for this class in exponential time. As a consequence, we obtain several EXPTIME-completeness results for problems on images of regular tree languages under tree homomorphisms, like set inclusion, regularity (HOM problem), and finiteness of set difference. Our result also has implications in term rewriting, since the set of reducible terms of a term rewrite system can be described as the image of a tree homomorphism. In particular, we prove that inclusion of sets of normal forms of term rewrite systems can be decided in exponential time. Analogous consequences arise in the context of XML typechecking, since types are defined by tree automata and some type transformations are homomorphic.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Worst-case Optimal Query Answering for Greedy Sets of Existential Rules and Their Subclasses
The need for an ontological layer on top of data, associated with advanced
reasoning mechanisms able to exploit the semantics encoded in ontologies, has
been acknowledged both in the database and knowledge representation
communities. We focus in this paper on the ontological query answering problem,
which consists of querying data while taking ontological knowledge into
account. More specifically, we establish complexities of the conjunctive query
entailment problem for classes of existential rules (also called
tuple-generating dependencies, Datalog+/- rules, or forall-exists-rules. Our
contribution is twofold. First, we introduce the class of greedy
bounded-treewidth sets (gbts) of rules, which covers guarded rules, and their
most well-known generalizations. We provide a generic algorithm for query
entailment under gbts, which is worst-case optimal for combined complexity with
or without bounded predicate arity, as well as for data complexity and query
complexity. Secondly, we classify several gbts classes, whose complexity was
unknown, with respect to combined complexity (with both unbounded and bounded
predicate arity) and data complexity to obtain a comprehensive picture of the
complexity of existential rule fragments that are based on diverse guardedness
notions. Upper bounds are provided by showing that the proposed algorithm is
optimal for all of them
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