Roman Rabinovich

Entanglement and the complexity of directed graphs

Entanglement is a parameter for the complexity of finite directed graphs that measures to what extent the cycles of the graph are intertwined. It is defined by way of a game similar in spirit to the cops and robber games used to describe treewidth, directed treewidth, and hypertree width. Nevertheless, on many classes of graphs, there are significant differences between entanglement and the various incarnations of treewidth. Entanglement is intimately related with the computational and descriptive complexity of the modal @m-calculus. The number of fixed-point variables needed to describe a finite graph up to bisimulation is captured by its entanglement. This plays a crucial role in the proof that the variable hierarchy of the @m-calculus is strict. We study complexity issues for entanglement and compare it to other structural parameters of directed graphs. One of our main results is that parity games of bounded entanglement can be solved in polynomial time. Specifically, we establish that the complexity of solving a parity game can be parametrised in terms of the minimal entanglement of subgames induced by a winning strategy. Furthermore, we discuss the case of graphs of entanglement two. While graphs of entanglement zero and one are very simple, graphs of entanglement two allow arbitrary nesting of cycles, and they form a sufficiently rich class for modelling relevant classes of structured systems. We provide characterisations of this class, and propose decomposition notions similar to the ones for treewidth, DAG-width, and Kelly-width.

Down the Borel Hierarchy: Solving Muller Games via Safety Games

We transform a Muller game with n vertices into a safety game with (n!)^3 vertices whose solution allows to determine the winning regions of the Muller game and to compute a finite-state winning strategy for one player. This yields a novel antichain-based memory structure and a natural notion of permissive strategies for Muller games. Moreover, we generalize our construction by presenting a new type of game reduction from infinite games to safety games and show its applicability to several other winning conditions.

Neighborhood Complexity and Kernelization for Nowhere Dense Classes of Graphs

We prove that whenever G is a graph from a nowhere dense graph class C, and A is a subset of vertices of G, then the number of subsets of A that are realized as intersections of A with r-neighborhoods of vertices of G is at most f(r,eps)|A|^(1+eps), where r is any positive integer, eps is any positive real, and f is a function that depends only on the class C. This yields a characterization of nowhere dense classes of graphs in terms of neighborhood complexity, which answers a question posed by [Reidl et al., CoRR, 2016]. As an algorithmic application of the above result, we show that for every fixed integer r, the parameterized Distance-r Dominating Set problem admits an almost linear kernel on any nowhere dense graph class. This proves a conjecture posed by [Drange et al., STACS 2016], and shows that the limit of parameterized tractability of Distance-r Dominating Set on subgraph-closed graph classes lies exactly on the boundary between nowhere denseness and somewhere denseness.

The Generalised Colouring Numbers on Classes of Bounded Expansion

The generalised colouring numbers

Graph Searching Games and Width Measures for Directed Graphs

\mathrm{adm}_r(G)

Directed graphs of entanglement two

,

Parity games with partial information played on graphs of bounded complexity

\mathrm{col}_r(G)

Distributed Domination on Graph Classes of Bounded Expansion

, and

On the generalised colouring numbers of graphs that exclude a fixed minor

\mathrm{wcol}_r(G)

Down the Borel hierarchy

were introduced by Kierstead and Yang as generalisations of the usual colouring number, also known as the degeneracy of a graph, and have since then found important applications in the theory of bounded expansion and nowhere dense classes of graphs, introduced by Nesetřil and Ossona de Mendez. In this paper, we study the relation of the colouring numbers with two other measures that characterise nowhere dense classes of graphs, namely with uniform quasi-wideness, studied first by Dawar et al. in the context of preservation theorems for first-order logic, and with the splitter game, introduced by Grohe et al. We show that every graph excluding a fixed topological minor admits a universal order, that is, one order witnessing that the colouring numbers are small for every value of