25 research outputs found
Successor-Invariant First-Order Logic on Graphs with Excluded Topological Subgraphs
We show that the model-checking problem for successor-invariant first-order
logic is fixed-parameter tractable on graphs with excluded topological
subgraphs when parameterised by both the size of the input formula and the size
of the exluded topological subgraph. Furthermore, we show that model-checking
for order-invariant first-order logic is tractable on coloured posets of
bounded width, parameterised by both the size of the input formula and the
width of the poset.
Our result for successor-invariant FO extends previous results for this logic
on planar graphs (Engelmann et al., LICS 2012) and graphs with excluded minors
(Eickmeyer et al., LICS 2013), further narrowing the gap between what is known
for FO and what is known for successor-invariant FO. The proof uses Grohe and
Marx's structure theorem for graphs with excluded topological subgraphs. For
order-invariant FO we show that Gajarsk\'y et al.'s recent result for FO
carries over to order-invariant FO
Faster Existential FO Model Checking on Posets
We prove that the model checking problem for the existential fragment of
first-order (FO) logic on partially ordered sets is fixed-parameter tractable
(FPT) with respect to the formula and the width of a poset (the maximum size of
an antichain). While there is a long line of research into FO model checking on
graphs, the study of this problem on posets has been initiated just recently by
Bova, Ganian and Szeider (CSL-LICS 2014), who proved that the existential
fragment of FO has an FPT algorithm for a poset of fixed width. We improve upon
their result in two ways: (1) the runtime of our algorithm is
O(f(|{\phi}|,w).n^2) on n-element posets of width w, compared to O(g(|{\phi}|).
n^{h(w)}) of Bova et al., and (2) our proofs are simpler and easier to follow.
We complement this result by showing that, under a certain
complexity-theoretical assumption, the existential FO model checking problem
does not have a polynomial kernel.Comment: Paper as accepted to the LMCS journal. An extended abstract of an
earlier version of this paper has appeared at ISAAC'14. Main changes to the
previous version are improvements in the Multicoloured Clique part (Section
4
FO-Definability of Shrub-Depth
Shrub-depth is a graph invariant often considered as an extension of tree-depth to dense graphs. We show that the model-checking problem of monadic second-order logic on a class of graphs of bounded shrub-depth can be decided by AC^0-circuits after a precomputation on the formula. This generalizes a similar result on graphs of bounded tree-depth [Y. Chen and J. Flum, 2018]. At the core of our proof is the definability in first-order logic of tree-models for graphs of bounded shrub-depth
FO Model Checking of Geometric Graphs
Over the past two decades the main focus of research into first-order (FO)
model checking algorithms has been on sparse relational structures -
culminating in the FPT algorithm by Grohe, Kreutzer and Siebertz for FO model
checking of nowhere dense classes of graphs. On contrary to that, except the
case of locally bounded clique-width only little is currently known about FO
model checking of dense classes of graphs or other structures. We study the FO
model checking problem for dense graph classes definable by geometric means
(intersection and visibility graphs). We obtain new nontrivial FPT results,
e.g., for restricted subclasses of circular-arc, circle, box, disk, and
polygon-visibility graphs. These results use the FPT algorithm by Gajarsk\'y et
al. for FO model checking of posets of bounded width. We also complement the
tractability results by related hardness reductions
Counting Subgraphs in Somewhere Dense Graphs
We study the problems of counting copies and induced copies of a small pattern graph H in a large host graph G. Recent work fully classified the complexity of those problems according to structural restrictions on the patterns H. In this work, we address the more challenging task of analysing the complexity for restricted patterns and restricted hosts. Specifically we ask which families of allowed patterns and hosts imply fixed-parameter tractability, i.e., the existence of an algorithm running in time f(H)?|G|^O(1) for some computable function f. Our main results present exhaustive and explicit complexity classifications for families that satisfy natural closure properties. Among others, we identify the problems of counting small matchings and independent sets in subgraph-closed graph classes ? as our central objects of study and establish the following crisp dichotomies as consequences of the Exponential Time Hypothesis:
- Counting k-matchings in a graph G ? ? is fixed-parameter tractable if and only if ? is nowhere dense.
- Counting k-independent sets in a graph G ? ? is fixed-parameter tractable if and only if ? is nowhere dense. Moreover, we obtain almost tight conditional lower bounds if ? is somewhere dense, i.e., not nowhere dense. These base cases of our classifications subsume a wide variety of previous results on the matching and independent set problem, such as counting k-matchings in bipartite graphs (Curticapean, Marx; FOCS 14), in F-colourable graphs (Roth, Wellnitz; SODA 20), and in degenerate graphs (Bressan, Roth; FOCS 21), as well as counting k-independent sets in bipartite graphs (Curticapean et al.; Algorithmica 19).
At the same time our proofs are much simpler: using structural characterisations of somewhere dense graphs, we show that a colourful version of a recent breakthrough technique for analysing pattern counting problems (Curticapean, Dell, Marx; STOC 17) applies to any subgraph-closed somewhere dense class of graphs, yielding a unified view of our current understanding of the complexity of subgraph counting
Minimum Path Cover: The Power of Parameterization
Computing a minimum path cover (MPC) of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is a
fundamental problem with a myriad of applications, including reachability.
Although it is known how to solve the problem by a simple reduction to minimum
flow, recent theoretical advances exploit this idea to obtain algorithms
parameterized by the number of paths of an MPC, known as the width. These
results obtain fast [M\"akinen et al., TALG] and even linear time [C\'aceres et
al., SODA 2022] algorithms in the small-width regime.
In this paper, we present the first publicly available high-performance
implementation of state-of-the-art MPC algorithms, including the parameterized
approaches. Our experiments on random DAGs show that parameterized algorithms
are orders-of-magnitude faster on dense graphs. Additionally, we present new
pre-processing heuristics based on transitive edge sparsification. We show that
our heuristics improve MPC-solvers by orders-of-magnitude
First-Order Interpretations of Bounded Expansion Classes
The notion of bounded expansion captures uniform sparsity of graph classes and renders various algorithmic problems that are hard in general tractable. In particular, the model-checking problem for first-order logic is fixed-parameter tractable over such graph classes. With the aim of generalizing such results to dense graphs, we introduce classes of graphs with structurally bounded expansion, defined as first-order interpretations of classes of bounded expansion. As a first step towards their algorithmic treatment, we provide their characterization analogous to the characterization of classes of bounded expansion via low treedepth decompositions, replacing treedepth by its dense analogue called shrubdepth