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Abstract In 2019, Dvořák asked whether every connected graph has a tree decomposition so that is a subgraph of and the width of is bounded by a function of the treewidth of . We prove that this is false, even when has treewidth 2 and is allowed to be a minor of . 

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. 

We consider the flip-width of geometric graphs, a notion of graph width recently introduced by Toruńczyk. We prove that many different types of geometric graphs have unbounded flip-width. These include interval graphs, permutation graphs, circle graphs, intersection graphs of axis-aligned line segments or axis-aligned unit squares, unit distance graphs, unit disk graphs, visibility graphs of simple polygons, β-skeletons, 4-polytopes, rectangle of influence graphs, and 3d Delaunay triangulations. 

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.