skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Twin-width IV: ordered graphs and matrices
We establish a list of characterizations of bounded twin-width for hereditary classes of totally ordered graphs: as classes of at most exponential growth studied in enumerative combinatorics, as monadically NIP classes studied in model theory, as classes that do not transduce the class of all graphs studied in finite model theory, and as classes for which model checking first-order logic is fixed-parameter tractable studied in algorithmic graph theory. This has several consequences. First, it allows us to show that every hereditary class of ordered graphs either has at most exponential growth, or has at least factorial growth. This settles a question first asked by Balogh, Bollobás, and Morris [Eur. J. Comb. ’06] on the growth of hereditary classes of ordered graphs, generalizing the Stanley-Wilf conjecture/Marcus-Tardos theorem. Second, it gives a fixed-parameter approximation algorithm for twin-width on ordered graphs. Third, it yields a full classification of fixed-parameter tractable first-order model checking on hereditary classes of ordered binary structures. Fourth, it provides a model-theoretic characterization of classes with bounded twin-width. Finally, it settles our small conjecture [SODA ’21] in the case of ordered graphs.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1848562
PAR ID:
10333486
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
STOC 2022: Proceedings of the 54th Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing
Page Range / eLocation ID:
924 to 937
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; (, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)
    Bringmann, Karl; Grohe, Martin; Puppis, Gabriele; Svensson, Ola (Ed.)
    Graph classes of bounded tree rank were introduced recently in the context of the model checking problem for first-order logic of graphs. These graph classes are a common generalization of graph classes of bounded degree and bounded treedepth, and they are a special case of graph classes of bounded expansion. We introduce a notion of decomposition for these classes and show that these decompositions can be efficiently computed. Also, a natural extension of our decomposition leads to a new characterization and decomposition for graph classes of bounded expansion (and an efficient algorithm computing this decomposition). We then focus on interpretations of graph classes of bounded tree rank. We give a characterization of graph classes interpretable in graph classes of tree rank 2. Importantly, our characterization leads to an efficient sparsification procedure: For any graph class 𝒞 interpretable in a graph class of tree rank at most 2, there is a polynomial time algorithm that to any G ∈ 𝒞 computes a (sparse) graph H from a fixed graph class of tree rank at most 2 such that G = I(H) for a fixed interpretation I. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first efficient "interpretation reversal" result that generalizes the result of Gajarský et al. [LICS 2016], who showed an analogous result for graph classes interpretable in classes of graphs of bounded degree. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, LICS '22: Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science)
    An interpretation is an operation that maps an input graph to an output graph by redefining its edge relation using a first-order formula. This rich framework includes operations such as taking the complement or a fixed power of a graph as (very) special cases. We prove that there is an FPT algorithm for the first-order model checking problem on classes of graphs which are first-order interpretable in classes of graphs with bounded local cliquewidth. Notably, this includes interpretations of planar graphs, and of classes of bounded genus in general. To obtain this result we develop a new tool which works in a very general setting of NIP classes and which we believe can be an important ingredient in obtaining similar results in the future. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; (, Advances in Combinatorics)
    A _theta_ is a graph consisting of two non-adjacent vertices and three internally disjoint paths between them, each of length at least two. For a family $$\mathcal{H}$$ of graphs, we say a graph $$G$$ is $$\mathcal{H}$$-_free_ if no induced subgraph of $$G$$ is isomorphic to a member of $$\mathcal{H}$$. We prove a conjecture of Sintiari and Trotignon, that there exists an absolute constant $$c$$ for which every (theta, triangle)-free graph $$G$$ has treewidth at most $$c\log (|V(G)|)$$. A construction by Sintiari and Trotignon shows that this bound is asymptotically best possible, and (theta, triangle)-free graphs comprise the first known hereditary class of graphs with arbitrarily large yet logarithmic treewidth.Our main result is in fact a generalization of the above conjecture, that treewidth is at most logarithmic in $|V(G)|$ for every graph $$G$$ excluding the so-called _three-path-configurations_ as well as a fixed complete graph. It follows that several NP-hard problems such as Stable Set, Vertex Cover, Dominating Set and $$k$$-Coloring (for fixed $$k$$) admit polynomial time algorithms in graphs excluding the three-path-configurations and a fixed complete graph. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)
    Etessami, Kousha; Feige, Uriel; Puppis, Gabriele (Ed.)
    A class of graphs C is monadically stable if for every unary expansion Ĉ of C, one cannot encode - using first-order transductions - arbitrarily long linear orders in graphs from C. It is known that nowhere dense graph classes are monadically stable; these include classes of bounded maximum degree and classes that exclude a fixed topological minor. On the other hand, monadic stability is a property expressed in purely model-theoretic terms that is also suited for capturing structure in dense graphs. In this work we provide a characterization of monadic stability in terms of the Flipper game: a game on a graph played by Flipper, who in each round can complement the edge relation between any pair of vertex subsets, and Localizer, who in each round is forced to restrict the game to a ball of bounded radius. This is an analog of the Splitter game, which characterizes nowhere dense classes of graphs (Grohe, Kreutzer, and Siebertz, J. ACM '17). We give two different proofs of our main result. The first proof is based on tools borrowed from model theory, and it exposes an additional property of monadically stable graph classes that is close in spirit to definability of types. Also, as a byproduct, we show that monadic stability for graph classes coincides with monadic stability of existential formulas with two free variables, and we provide another combinatorial characterization of monadic stability via forbidden patterns. The second proof relies on the recently introduced notion of flip-flatness (Dreier, Mählmann, Siebertz, and Toruńczyk, arXiv 2206.13765) and provides an efficient algorithm to compute Flipper’s moves in a winning strategy. 
    more » « less
  5. ; (, Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science)
    An efficient implicit representation of an n-vertex graph G in a family F of graphs assigns to each vertex of G a binary code of length O(log n) so that the adjacency between every pair of vertices can be determined only as a function of their codes. This function can depend on the family but not on the individual graph. Every family of graphs admitting such a representation contains at most 2^O(n log(n)) graphs on n vertices, and thus has at most factorial speed of growth. The Implicit Graph Conjecture states that, conversely, every hereditary graph family with at most factorial speed of growth admits an efficient implicit representation. We refute this conjecture by establishing the existence of hereditary graph families with factorial speed of growth that require codes of length n^Ω(1). 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email