Related papers: On the nonexistence of FO-continuous path and tree…
This paper studies graphs that have two tree decompositions with the property that every bag from the first decomposition has a bounded-size intersection with every bag from the second decomposition. We show that every graph in each of the…
Order-invariant formulas access an ordering on a structure's universe, but the model relation is independent of the used ordering. Order invariance is frequently used for logic-based approaches in computer science. Order-invariant formulas…
We study the expressive power and succinctness of order-invariant sentences of first-order (FO) and monadic second-order (MSO) logic on structures of bounded tree-depth. Order- invariance is undecidable in general and, thus, one strives for…
We introduce tree-width for first order formulae \phi, fotw(\phi). We show that computing fotw is fixed-parameter tractable with parameter fotw. Moreover, we show that on classes of formulae of bounded fotw, model checking is fixed…
We consider a specific class of tree structures that can represent basic structures in linguistics and computer science such as XML documents, parse trees, and treebanks, namely, finite node-labeled sibling-ordered trees. We present…
We study on which classes of graphs first-order logic (FO) and monadic second-order logic (MSO) have the same expressive power. We show that for all classes C of graphs that are closed under taking subgraphs, FO and MSO have the same…
Tree-decompositions and treewidth are of fundamental importance in structural and algorithmic graph theory. The "spread" of a tree-decomposition is the minimum integer $s$ such that every vertex lies in at most $s$ bags. A…
Transductions are a general formalism for expressing transformations of graphs (and more generally, of relational structures) in logic. We prove that a graph class $\mathscr{C}$ can be $\mathsf{FO}$-transduced from a class of bounded-height…
One of Courcelle's celebrated results states that if C is a class of graphs of bounded tree-width, then model-checking for monadic second order logic (MSO_2) is fixed-parameter tractable (fpt) on C by linear time parameterized algorithms,…
Separation Logic is a widely used formalism for describing dynamically allocated linked data structures, such as lists, trees, etc. The decidability status of various fragments of the logic constitutes a long standing open problem. Current…
Lifting attempts to speed up probabilistic inference by exploiting symmetries in the model. Exact lifted inference methods, like their propositional counterparts, work by recursively decomposing the model and the problem. In the…
We show that every connected graph $G$ has a tree decomposition indexed by a tree $T$ such that $T$ is a subgraph of $G$ and the width of the tree decomposition is bounded from above by a function of the pathwidth of $G$. This answers a…
In 1996, Bodlaender showed the celebrated result that an optimal tree decomposition of a graph of bounded treewidth can be found in linear time. The algorithm is based on an algorithm of Bodlaender and Kloks that computes an optimal tree…
The notion of bounded expansion captures uniform sparsity of graph classes and renders various algorithmic problems that are hard in general tractable. In particular, the model-checking problem for first-order logic is fixed-parameter…
In this article we study the treewidth of the \emph{display graph}, an auxiliary graph structure obtained from the fusion of phylogenetic (i.e., evolutionary) trees at their leaves. Earlier work has shown that the treewidth of the display…
One of Courcelle's celebrated results states that if C is a class of graphs of bounded tree-width, then model-checking for monadic second order logic is fixed-parameter tractable on C by linear time parameterised algorithms. An immediate…
Courcelle's celebrated theorem states that all MSO-expressible properties can be decided in linear time on graphs of bounded treewidth. Unfortunately, the hidden constant implied by this theorem is a tower of exponentials whose height…
The monadic second-order theory of trees allows quantification over elements and over arbitrary subsets. We classify the class of trees with respect to the question: does a tree T have a definable choice function (by a monadic formula with…
We prove decidability of the boundedness problem for monadic least fixed-point recursion based on positive monadic second-order (MSO) formulae over trees. Given an MSO-formula phi(X,x) that is positive in X, it is decidable whether the…
We give new decomposition theorems for classes of graphs that can be transduced in first-order logic from classes of sparse graphs -- more precisely, from classes of bounded expansion and from nowhere dense classes. In both cases, the…