6 research outputs found
Fast Algorithms for Parameterized Problems with Relaxed Disjointness Constraints
In parameterized complexity, it is a natural idea to consider different
generalizations of classic problems. Usually, such generalization are obtained
by introducing a "relaxation" variable, where the original problem corresponds
to setting this variable to a constant value. For instance, the problem of
packing sets of size at most into a given universe generalizes the Maximum
Matching problem, which is recovered by taking . Most often, the
complexity of the problem increases with the relaxation variable, but very
recently Abasi et al. have given a surprising example of a problem ---
-Simple -Path --- that can be solved by a randomized algorithm with
running time . That is, the complexity of the
problem decreases with . In this paper we pursue further the direction
sketched by Abasi et al. Our main contribution is a derandomization tool that
provides a deterministic counterpart of the main technical result of Abasi et
al.: the algorithm for -Monomial
Detection, which is the problem of finding a monomial of total degree and
individual degrees at most in a polynomial given as an arithmetic circuit.
Our technique works for a large class of circuits, and in particular it can be
used to derandomize the result of Abasi et al. for -Simple -Path. On our
way to this result we introduce the notion of representative sets for
multisets, which may be of independent interest. Finally, we give two more
examples of problems that were already studied in the literature, where the
same relaxation phenomenon happens. The first one is a natural relaxation of
the Set Packing problem, where we allow the packed sets to overlap at each
element at most times. The second one is Degree Bounded Spanning Tree,
where we seek for a spanning tree of the graph with a small maximum degree
The Graph Motif problem parameterized by the structure of the input graph
The Graph Motif problem was introduced in 2006 in the context of biological
networks. It consists of deciding whether or not a multiset of colors occurs in
a connected subgraph of a vertex-colored graph. Graph Motif has been mostly
analyzed from the standpoint of parameterized complexity. The main parameters
which came into consideration were the size of the multiset and the number of
colors. Though, in the many applications of Graph Motif, the input graph
originates from real-life and has structure. Motivated by this prosaic
observation, we systematically study its complexity relatively to graph
structural parameters. For a wide range of parameters, we give new or improved
FPT algorithms, or show that the problem remains intractable. For the FPT
cases, we also give some kernelization lower bounds as well as some ETH-based
lower bounds on the worst case running time. Interestingly, we establish that
Graph Motif is W[1]-hard (while in W[P]) for parameter max leaf number, which
is, to the best of our knowledge, the first problem to behave this way.Comment: 24 pages, accepted in DAM, conference version in IPEC 201
Mixing Color Coding-Related Techniques
Narrow sieves, representative sets and divide-and-color are three
breakthrough color coding-related techniques, which led to the design of
extremely fast parameterized algorithms. We present a novel family of
strategies for applying mixtures of them. This includes: (a) a mix of
representative sets and narrow sieves; (b) a faster computation of
representative sets under certain separateness conditions, mixed with
divide-and-color and a new technique, "balanced cutting"; (c) two mixtures of
representative sets, iterative compression and a new technique, "unbalanced
cutting". We demonstrate our strategies by obtaining, among other results,
significantly faster algorithms for -Internal Out-Branching and Weighted
3-Set -Packing, and a framework for speeding-up the previous best
deterministic algorithms for -Path, -Tree, -Dimensional -Matching,
Graph Motif and Partial Cover