Positive-Instance Driven Dynamic Programming for Treewidth

Consider a dynamic programming scheme for a decision problem in which all subproblems involved are also decision problems. An implementation of such a scheme is {\em positive-instance driven} (PID), if it generates positive subproblem instances, but not negative ones, building each on smaller positive instances. We take the dynamic programming scheme due to Bouchitt\'{e} and Todinca for treewidth computation, which is based on minimal separators and potential maximal cliques, and design a variant (for the decision version of the problem) with a natural PID implementation. The resulting algorithm performs extremely well: it solves a number of standard benchmark instances for which the optimal solutions have not previously been known. Incorporating a new heuristic algorithm for detecting safe separators, it also solves all of the 100 public instances posed by the exact treewidth track in PACE 2017, a competition on algorithm implementation. We describe the algorithm, prove its correctness, and give a running time bound in terms of the number of positive subproblem instances. We perform an experimental analysis which supports the practical importance of such a bound.Comment: A preliminary and abridged version appeared in ESA 201

Answer Set Solving with Bounded Treewidth Revisited

Parameterized algorithms are a way to solve hard problems more efficiently, given that a specific parameter of the input is small. In this paper, we apply this idea to the field of answer set programming (ASP). To this end, we propose two kinds of graph representations of programs to exploit their treewidth as a parameter. Treewidth roughly measures to which extent the internal structure of a program resembles a tree. Our main contribution is the design of parameterized dynamic programming algorithms, which run in linear time if the treewidth and weights of the given program are bounded. Compared to previous work, our algorithms handle the full syntax of ASP. Finally, we report on an empirical evaluation that shows good runtime behaviour for benchmark instances of low treewidth, especially for counting answer sets.Comment: This paper extends and updates a paper that has been presented on the workshop TAASP'16 (arXiv:1612.07601). We provide a higher detail level, full proofs and more example

Treewidth in Non-Ground Answer Set Solving and Alliance Problems in Graphs

To solve hard problems efficiently via answer set programming (ASP), a promising approach is to take advantage of the fact that real-world instances of many hard problems exhibit small treewidth. Algorithms that exploit this have already been proposed -- however, they suffer from an enormous overhead. In the thesis, we present improvements in the algorithmic methodology for leveraging bounded treewidth that are especially targeted toward problems involving subset minimization. This can be useful for many problems at the second level of the polynomial hierarchy like solving disjunctive ground ASP. Moreover, we define classes of non-ground ASP programs such that grounding such a program together with input facts does not lead to an excessive increase in treewidth of the resulting ground program when compared to the treewidth of the input. This allows ASP users to take advantage of the fact that state-of-the-art ASP solvers perform better on ground programs of small treewidth. Finally, we resolve several open questions on the complexity of alliance problems in graphs. In particular, we settle the long-standing open questions of the complexity of the Secure Set problem and whether the Defensive Alliance problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by treewidth

Parameterized Algorithmics for Computational Social Choice: Nine Research Challenges

Computational Social Choice is an interdisciplinary research area involving Economics, Political Science, and Social Science on the one side, and Mathematics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems) on the other side. Typical computational problems studied in this field include the vulnerability of voting procedures against attacks, or preference aggregation in multi-agent systems. Parameterized Algorithmics is a subfield of Theoretical Computer Science seeking to exploit meaningful problem-specific parameters in order to identify tractable special cases of in general computationally hard problems. In this paper, we propose nine of our favorite research challenges concerning the parameterized complexity of problems appearing in this context

A contraction-recursive algorithm for treewidth

Let tw(G) denote the treewidth of graph G. Given a graph G and a positive integer k such that tw(G) <= k + 1, we are to decide if tw(G) <= k. We give a certifying algorithm RTW ("R" for recursive) for this task: it returns one or more tree-decompositions of G of width <= k if the answer is YES and a minimal contraction H of G such that tw(H) > k otherwise. RTW uses a heuristic variant of Tamaki's PID algorithm for treewidth (ESA2017), which we call HPID. RTW, given G and k, interleaves the execution of HPID with recursive calls on G /e for edges e of G, where G / e denotes the graph obtained from G by contracting edge e. If we find that tw(G / e) > k, then we have tw(G) > k with the same certificate. If we find that tw(G / e) <= k, we "uncontract" the bags of the certifying tree-decompositions of G / e into bags of G and feed them to HPID to help progress. If the question is not resolved after the recursive calls are made for all edges, we finish HPID in an exhaustive mode. If it turns out that tw(G) > k, then G is a certificate for tw(G') > k for every G' of which G is a contraction, because we have found tw(G / e) <= k for every edge e of G. This final round of HPID guarantees the correctness of the algorithm, while its practical efficiency derives from our methods of "uncontracting" bags of tree-decompositions of G / e to useful bags of G, as well as of exploiting those bags in HPID. Experiments show that our algorithm drastically extends the scope of practically solvable instances. In particular, when applied to the 100 instances in the PACE 2017 bonus set, the number of instances solved by our implementation on a typical laptop, with the timeout of 100, 1000, and 10000 seconds per instance, are 72, 92, and 98 respectively, while these numbers are 11, 38, and 68 for Tamaki's PID solver and 65, 82, and 85 for his new solver (SEA 2022).Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, submitted IPEC 202

Finding Optimal Tree Decompositions

The task of organizing a given graph into a structure called a tree decomposition is relevant in multiple areas of computer science. In particular, many NP-hard problems can be solved in polynomial time if a suitable tree decomposition of a graph describing the problem instance is given as a part of the input. This motivates the task of finding as good tree decompositions as possible, or ideally, optimal tree decompositions. This thesis is about finding optimal tree decompositions of graphs with respect to several notions of optimality. Each of the considered notions measures the quality of a tree decomposition in the context of an application. In particular, we consider a total of seven problems that are formulated as finding optimal tree decompositions: treewidth, minimum fill-in, generalized and fractional hypertreewidth, total table size, phylogenetic character compatibility, and treelength. For each of these problems we consider the BT algorithm of Bouchitté and Todinca as the method of finding optimal tree decompositions. The BT algorithm is well-known on the theoretical side, but to our knowledge the first time it was implemented was only recently for the 2nd Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge (PACE 2017). The author’s implementation of the BT algorithm took the second place in the minimum fill-in track of PACE 2017. In this thesis we review and extend the BT algorithm and our implementation. In particular, we improve the eciency of the algorithm in terms of both theory and practice. We also implement the algorithm for each of the seven problems considered, introducing a novel adaptation of the algorithm for the maximum compatibility problem of phylogenetic characters. Our implementation outperforms alternative state-of-the-art approaches in terms of numbers of test instances solved on well-known benchmarks on minimum fill-in, generalized hypertreewidth, fractional hypertreewidth, total table size, and the maximum compatibility problem of phylogenetic characters. Furthermore, to our understanding the implementation is the first exact approach for the treelength problem

PACE Solver Description: Bute-Plus: A Bottom-Up Exact Solver for Treedepth

This note introduces Bute-Plus, an exact solver for the treedepth problem. The core of the solver is a positive-instance driven dynamic program that constructs an elimination tree of minimum depth in a bottom-up fashion. Three features greatly improve the algorithm's run time. The first of these is a specialised trie data structure. The second is a domination rule. The third is a heuristic presolve step can quickly find a treedepth decomposition of optimal depth for many instances.Comment: 4 pages, 1 appendix pages, 0 figures. A version of this tool description paper without the appendix is published in the proceedings of IPEC 2020: https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2020/13337/pdf/LIPIcs-IPEC-2020-34.pdf . Changes: this version expands the paper from a preliminary versio