arXiv subjects

Timothée Corsini

Publications and source records attributed to Timothée Corsini.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

In search of the lost tree: Hardness and relaxation of spanning trees in temporal graphs

A temporal graph is a graph whose edges appear at certain points in time. These graphs are temporally connected (in class TC) if all vertices can reach each other by temporal paths (traversing the edges in chronological order). Reachability based on temporal paths is not transitive, with important consequences. For instance, TC graphs do not always admit TC spanning trees. In this paper, we show that deciding if a given temporal graph admits a TC spanning tree is actually NP-complete. Then, we explore possible relaxations. A key feature of TC spanning trees is to support reachability along the same paths in both directions. We show that this property is not equivalent to TC spanning trees, it is more general and it can be tested in polynomial time. Still, minimizing the size of a spanner preserving this property -- a bidirectional spanner -- is \textsf{NP}-hard even more generally than TC spanning tree, including the setting of simple temporal graphs. Along the way, we show that deciding the existence of TC spanning tree is FPT when parameterized by the feedback edge set number (fes) of the underlying graph, and deciding bidirectional spanners of size $k$ is FPT when parameterized by fes + $\ell$ (the maximum number of labels per edge). On the structural side, we show that TC trees always admit a pivot vertex or a pivot edge -- reachable by all vertices by a certain time and able to reach all vertices afterward -- a fact that may be of independent interest.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2025

Chromatic discrepancy of locally $s$-colourable graphs

The chromatic discrepancy of a graph $G$, denoted $ϕ(G)$, is the least over all proper colourings $σ$ of $G$ of the greatest difference between the number of colours $|σ(V(H))|$ spanned by an induced subgraph $H$ of $G$ and its chromatic number $χ(H)$. We prove that the chromatic discrepancy of a triangle-free graph $G$ is at least $χ(G)-2$. This is best possible and positively answers a question raised by Aravind, Kalyanasundaram, Sandeep, and Sivadasan. More generally, we say that a graph $G$ is locally $s$-colourable if the closed neighbourhood of any vertex $v\in V(G)$ is properly $s$-colourable; in particular, a triangle-free graph is locally $2$-colourable. We conjecture that every locally $s$-colourable graph $G$ satisfies $ϕ(G) \geq χ(G)-s$, and show that this would be almost best possible. We prove the conjecture when $χ(G) \le 11s/6$, and as a partial result towards the general case, we prove that every locally $s$-colourable graph $G$ satisfies $ϕ(G) \geq χ(G) - s\ln χ(G)$. If the conjecture holds, it implies in particular, for every integer $\ell\geq 2$, that any graph $G$ without any copy of $C_{\ell+1}$, the cycle of length $\ell+1$, satisfies $ϕ(G) \geq χ(G) - \ell$. When $\ell \ge 3$ and $G\neq K_\ell$, we conjecture that we actually have $ϕ(G)\ge χ(G) - \ell + 1$, and prove it in the special case $\ell = 3$ or $χ(G) \le 5\ell/3$. In general, we further obtain that every $C_{\ell+1}$-free graph $G$ satisfies $ϕ(G) \geq χ(G) - O_{\ell}(\ln \ln χ(G))$. We do so by determining an almost tight bound on the chromatic number of balls of radius at most $\ell/2$ in $G$, which could be of independent interest.

math.CO↗

arXiv2025

Temporal Orienteering with Changing Fuel Costs

The problem Orienteering asks whether there exists a walk which visits a number of sites without exceeding some fuel budget. In the variant of the problem we consider, the cost of each edge in the walk is dependent on the time we depart one endpoint and the time we arrive at the other endpoint. This mirrors applications such as travel between orbiting objects where fuel costs are dependent on both the departure time and the length of time spent travelling. In defining this problem, we introduce a natural generalisation of the standard notion of temporal graphs: the pair consisting of the graph of the sites and a cost function, in which costs as well as shortest travel times between pairs of objects change over time. We believe this model is likely to be of independent interest. The problem of deciding whether a stated goal is feasible is easily seen to be NP-complete; we investigate three different ways to restrict the input which lead to efficient algorithms. These include the number of times an edge can be used, an analogue of vertex-interval-membership width, and the number of sites to be visited.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2025

Dismountability in Temporal Cliques Revisited

A temporal graph is a graph whose edges are available only at certain points in time. It is temporally connected if the nodes can reach each other by paths that traverse the edges chronologically (temporal paths). In general, temporal graphs do not always admit small subsets of edges that preserve connectivity (temporal spanners). In the case of temporal cliques, spanners of size $O(n\log n)$ are guaranteed. The original proof by Casteigts et al. [ICALP 2019] combines a number of techniques, one of which is dismountability. In a recent work, Angrick et al. [ESA 2024] simplified the proof and showed, among other things, that a one-sided version of dismountability can be used to replace the second part of the proof. In this paper, we revisit the dismountability principle. We characterizing the structure that a temporal clique has if it is not 1-hop dismountable, then not {1,2}-hop dismountable, and finally not {1,2,3}-hop dismountable. It turns out that if a clique is k-hop dismountable for any other k, then it must also be {1,2,3}-hop dismountable. Interestingly, excluding only 1-hop and 2-hop dismountability is already sufficient for reducing the spanner problem from cliques to bi-cliques. Put together with the strategy of Angrick et al., the entire $O(n \log n)$ result can now be recovered using only dismountability. An interesting by-product of our analysis is that any minimal counter-example to the existence of $4n$ spanners must satisfy the properties of non {1,2,3}-hop dismountable cliques. In the second part, we discuss connections between dismountability and pivotability. We show that recursively k-hop dismountable cliques are pivotable (and thus admits $2n$ spanners, whatever k). We define a family of labelings (called full-range) which force both dismountability and pivotability and that gives some evidence that large lifetimes could be exploited more generally.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2024

Simple, strict, proper, happy: A study of reachability in temporal graphs

Dynamic networks are a complex subject. Not only do they inherit the complexity of static networks (as a particular case); they are also sensitive to definitional subtleties that are a frequent source of confusion and incomparability of results in the literature. In this paper, we take a step back and examine three such aspects in more details, exploring their impact in a systematic way; namely, whether the temporal paths are required to be \emph{strict} (i.e., the times along a path must increasing, not just be non-decreasing), whether the time labeling is \emph{proper} (two adjacent edges cannot be present at the same time) and whether the time labeling is \emph{simple} (an edge can have only one presence time). In particular, we investigate how different combinations of these features impact the expressivity of the graph in terms of reachability. Our results imply a hierarchy of expressivity for the resulting settings, shedding light on the loss of generality that one is making when considering either combination. Some settings are more general than expected; in particular, proper temporal graphs turn out to be as expressive as general temporal graphs where non-strict paths are allowed. Also, we show that the simplest setting, that of \emph{happy} temporal graphs (i.e., both proper and simple) remains expressive enough to emulate the reachability of general temporal graphs in a certain (restricted but useful) sense. Furthermore, this setting is advocated as a target of choice for proving negative results. We illustrates this by strengthening two known results to happy graphs (namely, the inexistence of sparse spanners, and the hardness of computing temporal components). Overall, we hope that this article can be seen as a guide for choosing between different settings of temporal graphs, while being aware of the way these choices affect generality.

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arXiv2023

Partitioning into degenerate graphs in linear time

Let $G$ be a connected graph with maximum degree $Δ\geq 3$ distinct from $K_{Δ+ 1}$. Generalizing Brooks' Theorem, Borodin, Kostochka and Toft proved that if $p_1, \dots, p_s$ are non-negative integers such that $p_1 + \dots + p_s \geq Δ- s$, then $G$ admits a vertex partition into parts $A_1, \dots, A_s$ such that, for $1 \leq i \leq s$, $G[A_i]$ is $p_i$-degenerate. Here we show that such a partition can be performed in linear time. This generalizes previous results that treated subcases of a conjecture of Abu-Khzam, Feghali and Heggernes~\cite{abu2020partitioning}, which our result settles in full.

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