arXiv subjects

Thekla Hamm

Publications and source records attributed to Thekla Hamm.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Parameterized Complexity of Power Network Design: Coordinating Cable Placement is Hard

We study generalizations of the Steiner Tree problem motivated by the design of power networks. While Steiner Tree asks for a single minimum-cost tree connecting given terminal vertices, a power network typically consists of multiple trees, each connecting a subset of the terminals, to avoid electrical overloads. The cost of installing depends on both the cable lengths and the cost of digging underground trenches for putting the cables where the digging costs can be shared. These leads to variants of Steiner Tree where the goal is to compute a minimum-cost set of Steiner trees with a common root, that together connect all terminals while balancing the power demand of the terminals in each tree. Two important variants arise depending on whether the network is intended for low-voltage or high-voltage power. In the low-voltage case, power loss imposes a bound on the maximum depth of each tree, while no such restriction applies in the high-voltage case. We study the parameterized complexity of several power network design problems, parameterized by the number of terminals. While Steiner Tree is fixed-parameter tractable under this parameterization, most of our variants are W[1]-hard. For low-voltage networks, we present an XP-algorithm for planar inputs based on structural bounds on the treewidth of solution subgraphs. We also give a reduction from Grid Tiling showing tightness under ETH. The XP-algorithm extends to the high-voltage setting and general graphs, albeit at a cost in the running time. For high-voltage networks, we show the problem remains W[1]-hard even on planar graphs. Finally, we explore a variant of the cost model for sharing digging costs in which both problems become fixed-parameter tractable.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2026

Even Faster Geosocial Reachability Queries

Geosocial reachability queries (\textsc{RangeReach}) determine whether a given vertex in a geosocial network can reach any spatial vertex within a query region. The state-of-the-art 3DReach method answers such queries by encoding graph reachability through interval labelling and indexing spatial vertices in a 3D R-tree. We present 2DReach, a simpler approach that avoids interval labelling entirely. Like 3DReach, 2DReach collapses strongly connected components (SCCs) into a DAG, but instead of computing interval labels, it directly stores a 2D R-tree per component over all reachable spatial vertices. A query then reduces to a single 2D R-tree lookup. We further propose compressed variants that reduce storage by excluding spatial sinks and sharing R-trees between components with identical reachable sets. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that 2DReach achieves faster index construction than 3DReach, with the compressed variant yielding the smallest index size among all methods. 2DReach delivers competitive or superior query performance with more stable response times across varying query parameters.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2026

A Polynomial Kernel for Face Cover on Non-Embedded Planar Graphs

Given a planar graph, a subset of its vertices called terminals, and $k \in \mathbb{N}$, the Face Cover Number problem asks whether the terminals lie on the boundaries of at most $k$ faces of some embedding of the input graph. When a plane graph is given in the input, the problem is known to have a polynomial kernel~\cite{GarneroST17}. In this paper, we present the first polynomial kernel for Face Cover Number when the input is a planar graph (without a fixed embedding). Our approach overcomes the challenge of not having a predefined set of face boundaries by building a kernel bottom-up on an SPR-tree while preserving the essential properties of the face cover along the way.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2025

A Dichotomy for 1-Planarity with Restricted Crossing Types Parameterized by Treewidth

A drawing of a graph is 1-planar if each edge participates in at most one crossing and adjacent edges do not cross. Up to symmetry, each crossing in a 1-planar drawing belongs to one out of six possible crossing types, where a type characterizes the subgraph induced by the four vertices of the crossing edges. Each of the 63 possible nonempty subsets $\mathcal{S}$ of crossing types gives a recognition problem: does a given graph admit an $\mathcal{S}$-restricted drawing, that is, a 1-planar drawing where the crossing type of each crossing is in $\mathcal{S}$? We show that there is a set $\mathcal{S}_{\rm bad}$ with three crossing types and the following properties: If $\mathcal{S}$ contains no crossing type from $\mathcal{S}_{\rm bad}$, then the recognition of graphs that admit an $\mathcal{S}$-restricted drawing is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the treewidth of the input graph. If $\mathcal{S}$ contains any crossing type from $\mathcal{S}_{\rm bad}$, then it is NP-hard to decide whether a graph has an $\mathcal{S}$-restricted drawing, even when considering graphs of constant pathwidth. We also extend this characterization of crossing types to 1-planar straight-line drawings and show the same complexity behaviour parameterized by treewidth.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2025

Oracle Separations for RPH

While theoretical computer science primarily works with discrete models of computation, like the Turing machine and the wordRAM, there are many scenarios in which introducing real computation models is more adequate. We want to compare real models of computation with discrete models of computation. We do this by means of oracle separation results. We define the notion of a real Turing machine as an extension of the (binary) Turing machine by adding a real tape. Using those machines, we define and study the real polynomial hierarchy RPH. We are interested in RPH as the first level of the hierarchy corresponds to the well-known complexity class ER. It is known that $NP \subseteq ER \subseteq PSPACE$ and furthermore $PH \subseteq RPH \subseteq PSPACE$. We are interested to know if any of those inclusions are tight. In the absence of unconditional separations of complexity classes, we turn to oracle separation. We develop a technique that allows us to transform oracle separation results from the binary world to the real world. As applications, we show there are oracles such that: - $RPH^O$ proper subset of $PSPACE^O$, - $Σ_{k+1}^O$ not contained in $Σ_kR^O$, for all $k\geq 0$, - $Σ_kR^O$ proper subset of $Σ_{k+1}R^O$, for all $k\geq 0$, - $BQP^O$ not contained in $RPH^O$. Our results hint that ER is strictly contained in PSPACE and that there is a separation between the different levels of the real polynomial hierarchy. We also bound the power of real computations by showing that NP-hard problems are unlikely to be solvable using polynomial time on a realRAM. Furthermore, our oracle separations hint that polynomial-time quantum computing cannot be simulated on an efficient real Turing machine.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2024

Computing crossing numbers with topological and geometric restrictions

Computing the crossing number of a graph is one of the most classical problems in computational geometry. Both it and numerous variations of the problem have been studied, and overcoming their frequent computational difficulty is an active area of research. Particularly recently, there has been increased effort to show and understand the parameterized tractability of various crossing number variants. While many results in this direction use a similar approach, a general framework remains elusive. We suggest such a framework that generalizes important previous results, and can even be used to show the tractability of deciding crossing number variants for which this was stated as an open problem in previous literature. Our framework targets variants that prescribe a partial predrawing and some kind of topological restrictions on crossings. Additionally, to provide evidence for the non-generalizability of previous approaches for the partially crossing number problem to allow for geometric restrictions, we show a new more constrained hardness result for partially predrawn rectilinear crossing number. In particular, we show W-hardness of deciding Straight-Line Planarity Extension parameterized by the number of missing edges.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2024

The Complexity of Temporal Vertex Cover in Small-Degree Graphs

Temporal graphs naturally model graphs whose underlying topology changes over time. Recently, the problems TEMPORAL VERTEX COVER (or TVC) and SLIDING-WINDOW TEMPORAL VERTEX COVER(or $Δ$-TVC for time-windows of a fixed-length $Δ$) have been established as natural extensions of the classic problem VERTEX COVER on static graphs with connections to areas such as surveillance in sensor networks. In this paper we initiate a systematic study of the complexity of TVC and $Δ$-TVC on sparse graphs. Our main result shows that for every $Δ\geq 2$, $Δ$-TVC is NP-hard even when the underlying topology is described by a path or a cycle. This resolves an open problem from literature and shows a surprising contrast between $Δ$-TVC and TVC for which we provide a polynomial-time algorithm in the same setting. To circumvent this hardness, we present a number of exact and approximation algorithms for temporal graphs whose underlying topologies are given by a path, that have bounded vertex degree in every time step, or that admit a small-sized temporal vertex cover.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2024

Hedonic Diversity Games: A Complexity Picture with More than Two Colors

Hedonic diversity games are a variant of the classical Hedonic games designed to better model a variety of questions concerning diversity and fairness. Previous works mainly targeted the case with two diversity classes (represented as colors in the model) and provided some initial complexity-theoretic and existential results concerning Nash and individually stable outcomes. Here, we design new algorithms accompanied with lower bounds which provide a complete parameterized-complexity picture for computing Nash and individually stable outcomes with respect to the most natural parameterizations of the problem. Crucially, our results hold for general Hedonic diversity games where the number of colors is not necessarily restricted to two, and show that -- apart from two trivial cases -- a necessary condition for tractability in this setting is that the number of colors is bounded by the parameter. Moreover, for the special case of two colors we resolve an open question asked in previous work (Boehmer and Elkind, AAAI 2020).

cs.GT↗

arXiv2023

The Complexity of Envy-Free Graph Cutting

We consider the problem of fairly dividing a set of heterogeneous divisible resources among agents with different preferences. We focus on the setting where the resources correspond to the edges of a connected graph, every agent must be assigned a connected piece of this graph, and the fairness notion considered is the classical envy freeness. The problem is NP-complete, and we analyze its complexity with respect to two natural complexity measures: the number of agents and the number of edges in the graph. While the problem remains NP-hard even for instances with 2 agents, we provide a dichotomy characterizing the complexity of the problem when the number of agents is constant based on structural properties of the graph. For the latter case, we design a polynomial-time algorithm when the graph has a constant number of edges.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2023

Maximizing Social Welfare in Score-Based Social Distance Games

Social distance games have been extensively studied as a coalition formation model where the utilities of agents in each coalition were captured using a utility function $u$ that took into account distances in a given social network. In this paper, we consider a non-normalized score-based definition of social distance games where the utility function $u^s$ depends on a generic scoring vector $s$, which may be customized to match the specifics of each individual application scenario. As our main technical contribution, we establish the tractability of computing a welfare-maximizing partitioning of the agents into coalitions on tree-like networks, for every score-based function $u^s$. We provide more efficient algorithms when dealing with specific choices of $u^s$ or simpler networks, and also extend all of these results to computing coalitions that are Nash stable or individually rational. We view these results as a further strong indication of the usefulness of the proposed score-based utility function: even on very simple networks, the problem of computing a welfare-maximizing partitioning into coalitions remains open for the originally considered canonical function $u$.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2023

A Structural Complexity Analysis of Synchronous Dynamical Systems

Synchronous dynamic systems are well-established models that have been used to capture a range of phenomena in networks, including opinion diffusion, spread of disease and product adoption. We study the three most notable problems in synchronous dynamic systems: whether the system will transition to a target configuration from a starting configuration, whether the system will reach convergence from a starting configuration, and whether the system is guaranteed to converge from every possible starting configuration. While all three problems were known to be intractable in the classical sense, we initiate the study of their exact boundaries of tractability from the perspective of structural parameters of the network by making use of the more fine-grained parameterized complexity paradigm. As our first result, we consider treewidth - as the most prominent and ubiquitous structural parameter - and show that all three problems remain intractable even on instances of constant treewidth. We complement this negative finding with fixed-parameter algorithms for the former two problems parameterized by treedepth, a well-studied restriction of treewidth. While it is possible to rule out a similar algorithm for convergence guarantee under treedepth, we conclude with a fixed-parameter algorithm for this last problem when parameterized by treedepth and the maximum in-degree.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2023

Maximizing Social Welfare in Score-Based Social Distance Games

Social distance games have been extensively studied as a coalition formation model where the utilities of agents in each coalition were captured using a utility function u that took into account distances in a given social network. In this paper, we consider a non-normalized score-based definition of social distance games where the utility function u_v depends on a generic scoring vector v, which may be customized to match the specifics of each individual application scenario. As our main technical contribution, we establish the tractability of computing a welfare-maximizing partitioning of the agents into coalitions on tree-like networks, for every score-based function u_v. We provide more efficient algorithms when dealing with specific choices of u_v or simpler networks, and also extend all of these results to computing coalitions that are Nash stable or individually rational. We view these results as a further strong indication of the usefulness of the proposed score-based utility function: even on very simple networks, the problem of computing a welfare-maximizing partitioning into coalitions remains open for the originally considered canonical function u.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2023

Polynomial-time Approximation of Independent Set Parameterized by Treewidth

We prove the following result about approximating the maximum independent set in a graph. Informally, we show that any approximation algorithm with a ``non-trivial'' approximation ratio (as a function of the number of vertices of the input graph $G$) can be turned into an approximation algorithm achieving almost the same ratio, albeit as a function of the treewidth of $G$. More formally, we prove that for any function $f$, the existence of a polynomial time $(n/f(n))$-approximation algorithm yields the existence of a polynomial time $O(tw \cdot\log{f(tw)}/f(tw))$-approximation algorithm, where $n$ and $tw$ denote the number of vertices and the width of a given tree decomposition of the input graph. By pipelining our result with the state-of-the-art $O(n \cdot (\log \log n)^2/\log^3 n)$-approximation algorithm by Feige (2004), this implies an $O(tw \cdot (\log \log tw)^3/\log^3 tw)$-approximation algorithm.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2023

Approximate Evaluation of Quantitative Second Order Queries

Courcelle's theorem and its adaptations to cliquewidth have shaped the field of exact parameterized algorithms and are widely considered the archetype of algorithmic meta-theorems. In the past decade, there has been growing interest in developing parameterized approximation algorithms for problems which are not captured by Courcelle's theorem and, in particular, are considered not fixed-parameter tractable under the associated widths. We develop a generalization of Courcelle's theorem that yields efficient approximation schemes for any problem that can be captured by an expanded logic we call Blocked CMSO, capable of making logical statements about the sizes of set variables via so-called weight comparisons. The logic controls weight comparisons via the quantifier-alternation depth of the involved variables, allowing full comparisons for zero-alternation variables and limited comparisons for one-alternation variables. We show that the developed framework threads the very needle of tractability: on one hand it can describe a broad range of approximable problems, while on the other hand we show that the restrictions of our logic cannot be relaxed under well-established complexity assumptions. The running time of our approximation scheme is polynomial in $1/\varepsilon$, allowing us to fully interpolate between faster approximate algorithms and slower exact algorithms. This provides a unified framework to explain the tractability landscape of graph problems parameterized by treewidth and cliquewidth, as well as classical non-graph problems such as Subset Sum and Knapsack.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2022

The Fine-Grained Complexity of Graph Homomorphism Parameterized by Clique-Width

The generic homomorphism problem, which asks whether an input graph $G$ admits a homomorphism into a fixed target graph $H$, has been widely studied in the literature. In this article, we provide a fine-grained complexity classification of the running time of the homomorphism problem with respect to the clique-width of $G$ (denoted $\operatorname{cw}$) for virtually all choices of $H$ under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. In particular, we identify a property of $H$ called the signature number $s(H)$ and show that for each $H$, the homomorphism problem can be solved in time $\mathcal{O}^*(s(H)^{\operatorname{cw}})$. Crucially, we then show that this algorithm can be used to obtain essentially tight upper bounds. Specifically, we provide a reduction that yields matching lower bounds for each $H$ that is either a projective core or a graph admitting a factorization with additional properties -- allowing us to cover all possible target graphs under long-standing conjectures.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2022

Parameterised Partially-Predrawn Crossing Number

Inspired by the increasingly popular research on extending partial graph drawings, we propose a new perspective on the traditional and arguably most important geometric graph parameter, the crossing number. Specifically, we define the partially predrawn crossing number to be the smallest number of crossings in any drawing of a graph, part of which is prescribed on the input (not counting the prescribed crossings). Our main result - an FPT-algorithm to compute the partially predrawn crossing number - combines advanced ideas from research on the classical crossing number and so called partial planarity in a very natural but intricate way. Not only do our techniques generalise the known FPT-algorithm by Grohe for computing the standard crossing number, they also allow us to substantially improve a number of recent parameterised results for various drawing extension problems.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2021

A Unifying Framework for Characterizing and Computing Width Measures

Algorithms for computing or approximating optimal decompositions for decompositional parameters such as treewidth or clique-width have so far traditionally been tailored to specific width parameters. Moreover, for mim-width, no efficient algorithms for computing good decompositions were known, even under highly restrictive parameterizations. In this work we identify F-branchwidth as a class of generic decompositional parameters that can capture mim-width, treewidth, clique-width as well as other measures. We show that while there is an infinite number of F-branchwidth parameters, only a handful of these are asymptotically distinct. We then develop fixed-parameter and kernelization algorithms (under several structural parameterizations) that can compute every possible F-branchwidth, providing a unifying framework that can efficiently obtain near-optimal tree-decompositions, k-expressions, as well as optimal mim-width decompositions.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2020

Crossing-Optimal Extension of Simple Drawings

In extension problems of partial graph drawings one is given an incomplete drawing of an input graph $G$ and is asked to complete the drawing while maintaining certain properties. A prominent area where such problems arise is that of crossing minimization. For plane drawings and various relaxations of these, there is a number of tractability as well as lower-bound results exploring the computational complexity of crossing-sensitive drawing extension problems. In contrast, comparatively few results are known on extension problems for the fundamental and broad class of simple drawings, that is, drawings in which each pair of edges intersects in at most one point. In fact, only recently it has been shown that the extension problem of simple drawings is NP-hard even when the task is to insert a single edge. In this paper we present tractability results for the crossing-sensitive extension problem of simple drawings. In particular, we show that the problem of inserting edges into a simple drawing is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the number of edges to insert and an upper bound on newly created crossings. Using the same proof techniques, we are also able to answer several closely related variants of this problem, among others the extension problem for $k$-plane drawings. Moreover, using a different approach, we provide a single-exponential fixed-parameter algorithm for the case in which we are only trying to insert a single edge into the drawing.

cs.CG↗