Polychromatic Colorings of Geometric Hypergraphs via Shallow Hitting Sets

A range family $\mathcal{R}$ is a family of subsets of $\mathbb{R}^d$, like all halfplanes, or all unit disks. Given a range family $\mathcal{R}$, we consider the $m$-uniform range capturing hypergraphs $\mathcal{H}(V,\mathcal{R},m)$ whose vertex-sets $V$ are finite sets of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with any $m$ vertices forming a hyperedge $e$ whenever $e = V \cap R$ for some $R \in \mathcal{R}$. Given additionally an integer $k \geq 2$, we seek to find the minimum $m = m_{\mathcal{R}}(k)$ such that every $\mathcal{H}(V,\mathcal{R},m)$ admits a polychromatic $k$-coloring of its vertices, that is, where every hyperedge contains at least one point of each color. Clearly, $m_{\mathcal{R}}(k) \geq k$ and the gold standard is an upper bound $m_{\mathcal{R}}(k) = O(k)$ that is linear in $k$. A $t$-shallow hitting set in $\mathcal{H}(V,\mathcal{R},m)$ is a subset $S \subseteq V$ such that $1 \leq |e \cap S| \leq t$ for each hyperedge $e$; i.e., every hyperedge is hit at least once but at most $t$ times by $S$. We show for several range families $\mathcal{R}$ the existence of $t$-shallow hitting sets in every $\mathcal{H}(V,\mathcal{R},m)$ with $t$ being a constant only depending on $\mathcal{R}$. This in particular proves that $m_{\mathcal{R}}(k) \leq tk = O(k)$ in such cases, improving previous polynomial bounds in $k$. Particularly, we prove this for the range families of all axis-aligned strips in $\mathbb{R}^d$, all bottomless and topless rectangles in $\mathbb{R}^2$, and for all unit-height axis-aligned rectangles in $\mathbb{R}^2$.