30 research outputs found
The First Order Definability of Graphs with Separators via the Ehrenfeucht Game
We say that a first order formula defines a graph if is
true on and false on every graph non-isomorphic with . Let
be the minimal quantifier rank of a such formula. We prove that, if is a
tree of bounded degree or a Hamiltonian (equivalently, 2-connected) outerplanar
graph, then , where denotes the order of . This bound is
optimal up to a constant factor. If is a constant, for connected graphs
with no minor and degree , we prove the bound
. This result applies to planar graphs and, more generally, to
graphs of bounded genus.Comment: 17 page
Order Invariance on Decomposable Structures
Order-invariant formulas access an ordering on a structure's universe, but
the model relation is independent of the used ordering. Order invariance is
frequently used for logic-based approaches in computer science. Order-invariant
formulas capture unordered problems of complexity classes and they model the
independence of the answer to a database query from low-level aspects of
databases. We study the expressive power of order-invariant monadic
second-order (MSO) and first-order (FO) logic on restricted classes of
structures that admit certain forms of tree decompositions (not necessarily of
bounded width).
While order-invariant MSO is more expressive than MSO and, even, CMSO (MSO
with modulo-counting predicates), we show that order-invariant MSO and CMSO are
equally expressive on graphs of bounded tree width and on planar graphs. This
extends an earlier result for trees due to Courcelle. Moreover, we show that
all properties definable in order-invariant FO are also definable in MSO on
these classes. These results are applications of a theorem that shows how to
lift up definability results for order-invariant logics from the bags of a
graph's tree decomposition to the graph itself.Comment: Accepted for LICS 201
Logarithmic Weisfeiler--Leman and Treewidth
In this paper, we show that the -dimensional Weisfeiler--Leman
algorithm can identify graphs of treewidth in rounds. This
improves the result of Grohe & Verbitsky (ICALP 2006), who previously
established the analogous result for -dimensional Weisfeiler--Leman. In
light of the equivalence between Weisfeiler--Leman and the logic (Cai, F\"urer, & Immerman, Combinatorica 1992), we obtain an
improvement in the descriptive complexity for graphs of treewidth .
Precisely, if is a graph of treewidth , then there exists a
-variable formula in with
quantifier depth that identifies up to isomorphism
First-Order Definability of Trees and Sparse Random Graphs
This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Let D(G) be the smallest quantifier depth of a first-order formula which is true for a graph G but false for any other non-isomorphic graph. This can be viewed as a measure for the descriptive complexity of G in first-order logic.
We show that almost surely , where G is a random tree of order n or the giant component of a random graph with constant c<1. These results rely on computing the maximum of D(T) for a tree T of order n and maximum degree l, so we study this problem as well.Peer Reviewe
The Power of the Weisfeiler-Leman Algorithm to Decompose Graphs
The Weisfeiler-Leman procedure is a widely-used approach for graph
isomorphism testing that works by iteratively computing an
isomorphism-invariant coloring of vertex tuples. Meanwhile, a fundamental tool
in structural graph theory, which is often exploited in approaches to tackle
the graph isomorphism problem, is the decomposition into 2- and 3-connected
components.
We prove that the 2-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm implicitly
computes the decomposition of a graph into its 3-connected components. Thus,
the dimension of the algorithm needed to distinguish two given graphs is at
most the dimension required to distinguish the corresponding decompositions
into 3-connected components (assuming it is at least 2).
This result implies that for k >= 2, the k-dimensional algorithm
distinguishes k-separators, i.e., k-tuples of vertices that separate the graph,
from other vertex k-tuples. As a byproduct, we also obtain insights about the
connectivity of constituent graphs of association schemes.
In an application of the results, we show the new upper bound of k on the
Weisfeiler-Leman dimension of graphs of treewidth at most k. Using a
construction by Cai, F\"urer, and Immerman, we also provide a new lower bound
that is asymptotically tight up to a factor of 2.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures, full version of a paper accepted at MFCS 201