Groups acting on quasi-median graphs. An introduction

Quasi-median graphs have been introduced by Mulder in 1980 as a generalisation of median graphs, known in geometric group theory to naturally coincide with the class of CAT(0) cube complexes. In his PhD thesis, the author showed that quasi-median graphs may be useful to study groups as well. In the present paper, we propose a gentle introduction to the theory of groups acting on quasi-median graphs.Comment: 16 pages. Comments are welcom

Nice labeling problem for event structures: a counterexample

In this note, we present a counterexample to a conjecture of Rozoy and Thiagarajan from 1991 (called also the nice labeling problem) asserting that any (coherent) event structure with finite degree admits a labeling with a finite number of labels, or equivalently, that there exists a function $f: \mathbb{N} \mapsto \mathbb{N}$ such that an event structure with degree $\le n$ admits a labeling with at most $f(n)$ labels. Our counterexample is based on the Burling's construction from 1965 of 3-dimensional box hypergraphs with clique number 2 and arbitrarily large chromatic numbers and the bijection between domains of event structures and median graphs established by Barth\'elemy and Constantin in 1993

Bucolic Complexes

We introduce and investigate bucolic complexes, a common generalization of systolic complexes and of CAT(0) cubical complexes. They are defined as simply connected prism complexes satisfying some local combinatorial conditions. We study various approaches to bucolic complexes: from graph-theoretic and topological perspective, as well as from the point of view of geometric group theory. In particular, we characterize bucolic complexes by some properties of their 2-skeleta and 1-skeleta (that we call bucolic graphs), by which several known results are generalized. We also show that locally-finite bucolic complexes are contractible, and satisfy some nonpositive-curvature-like properties.Comment: 45 pages, 4 figure

Hypercellular graphs: partial cubes without Q3−Q_3^- as partial cube minor

We investigate the structure of isometric subgraphs of hypercubes (i.e., partial cubes) which do not contain finite convex subgraphs contractible to the 3-cube minus one vertex $Q^-_3$ (here contraction means contracting the edges corresponding to the same coordinate of the hypercube). Extending similar results for median and cellular graphs, we show that the convex hull of an isometric cycle of such a graph is gated and isomorphic to the Cartesian product of edges and even cycles. Furthermore, we show that our graphs are exactly the class of partial cubes in which any finite convex subgraph can be obtained from the Cartesian products of edges and even cycles via successive gated amalgams. This decomposition result enables us to establish a variety of results. In particular, it yields that our class of graphs generalizes median and cellular graphs, which motivates naming our graphs hypercellular. Furthermore, we show that hypercellular graphs are tope graphs of zonotopal complexes of oriented matroids. Finally, we characterize hypercellular graphs as being median-cell -- a property naturally generalizing the notion of median graphs.Comment: 35 pages, 6 figures, added example answering Question 1 from earlier draft (Figure 6.

On embeddings of CAT(0) cube complexes into products of trees

We prove that the contact graph of a 2-dimensional CAT(0) cube complex ${\bf X}$ of maximum degree $\Delta$ can be coloured with at most $\epsilon(\Delta)=M\Delta^{26}$ colours, for a fixed constant $M$. This implies that ${\bf X}$ (and the associated median graph) isometrically embeds in the Cartesian product of at most $\epsilon(\Delta)$ trees, and that the event structure whose domain is ${\bf X}$ admits a nice labeling with $\epsilon(\Delta)$ labels. On the other hand, we present an example of a 5-dimensional CAT(0) cube complex with uniformly bounded degrees of 0-cubes which cannot be embedded into a Cartesian product of a finite number of trees. This answers in the negative a question raised independently by F. Haglund, G. Niblo, M. Sageev, and the first author of this paper.Comment: Some small corrections; main change is a correction of the computation of the bounds in Theorem 1. Some figures repaire

Graph matching with a dual-step EM algorithm

This paper describes a new approach to matching geometric structure in 2D point-sets. The novel feature is to unify the tasks of estimating transformation geometry and identifying point-correspondence matches. Unification is realized by constructing a mixture model over the bipartite graph representing the correspondence match and by affecting optimization using the EM algorithm. According to our EM framework, the probabilities of structural correspondence gate contributions to the expected likelihood function used to estimate maximum likelihood transformation parameters. These gating probabilities measure the consistency of the matched neighborhoods in the graphs. The recovery of transformational geometry and hard correspondence matches are interleaved and are realized by applying coupled update operations to the expected log-likelihood function. In this way, the two processes bootstrap one another. This provides a means of rejecting structural outliers. We evaluate the technique on two real-world problems. The first involves the matching of different perspective views of 3.5-inch floppy discs. The second example is furnished by the matching of a digital map against aerial images that are subject to severe barrel distortion due to a line-scan sampling process. We complement these experiments with a sensitivity study based on synthetic data

Helly meets Garside and Artin

A graph is Helly if every family of pairwise intersecting combinatorial balls has a nonempty intersection. We show that weak Garside groups of finite type and FC-type Artin groups are Helly, that is, they act geometrically on Helly graphs. In particular, such groups act geometrically on spaces with convex geodesic bicombing, equipping them with a nonpositive-curvature-like structure. That structure has many properties of a CAT(0) structure and, additionally, it has a combinatorial flavor implying biautomaticity. As immediate consequences we obtain new results for FC-type Artin groups (in particular braid groups and spherical Artin groups) and weak Garside groups, including e.g.\ fundamental groups of the complements of complexified finite simplicial arrangements of hyperplanes, braid groups of well-generated complex reflection groups, and one-relator groups with non-trivial center. Among the results are: biautomaticity, existence of EZ and Tits boundaries, the Farrell-Jones conjecture, the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture, and a description of higher order homological and homotopical Dehn functions. As a mean of proving the Helly property we introduce and use the notion of a (generalized) cell Helly complex.Comment: Small modifications according to the referee report, updated references. Final accepted versio