English

Dynamic programming on bipartite tree decompositions

Data Structures and Algorithms 2025-12-01 v2

Abstract

We revisit a graph width parameter that we dub bipartite treewidth (btw). Bipartite treewidth can be seen as a common generalization of treewidth and the odd cycle transversal number, and is closely related to odd-minors. Intuitively, a bipartite tree decomposition is a tree decomposition whose bags induce almost bipartite graphs and whose adhesions contain at most one "bipartite" vertex, while the width of such decomposition measures the number of "non-bipartite" vertices in a bag. We provide para-NP-completeness results and develop dynamic programming techniques to solve problems on graphs of small btw. In particular, we show that KtK_t-Subgraph-Cover, Weighted Independent Set, Odd Cycle Transversal, and Maximum Weighted Cut are FPTFPT parameterized by btw. We also provide the following dichotomy when HH is a 2-connected graph: if HH is bipartite, then HH-Subgraph/Induced-Subgraph/Odd-Minor/Scattered-Packing is para-NP-complete parameterized by btw while, if HH is non-bipartite, then the problem is solvable in XP-time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.07754,
  title  = {Dynamic programming on bipartite tree decompositions},
  author = {Lars Jaffke and Laure Morelle and Ignasi Sau and Dimitrios M. Thilikos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.07754},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Presented in IPEC 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:21:37.701Z