Related papers: On the nonexistence of FO-continuous path and tree…

We prove a general width duality theorem for combinatorial structures with well-defined notions of cohesion and separation. These might be graphs and matroids, but can be much more general or quite different. The theorem asserts a duality…

We introduce structured decompositions, category-theoretic structures which simultaneously generalize notions from graph theory (including treewidth, layered treewidth, co-treewidth, graph decomposition width, tree independence number,…

We introduce torsoids, a canonical structure in matching covered graphs, corresponding to the bricks and braces of the graph. This allows a more fine-grained understanding of the structure of finite and infinite directed graphs with respect…

Order-invariant first-order logic is an extension of first-order logic FO where formulae can make use of a linear order on the structures, under the proviso that they are order-invariant, i.e. that their truth value is the same for all…

The first-order theory of a string automatic structure is known to be decidable, but there are examples of string automatic structures with nonelementary first-order theories. We prove that the first-order theory of a string automatic…

The notion of directed treewidth was introduced by Johnson, Robertson, Seymour and Thomas [Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, Vol 82, 2001] as a first step towards an algorithmic metatheory for digraphs. They showed that some…

We propose to study transformations on graphs, and more generally structures, by looking at how the cut-rank (as introduced by Oum) of subsets is affected when going from the input structure to the output structure. We consider…

While modal extensions of decidable fragments of first-order logic are usually undecidable, their monodic counterparts, in which formulas in the scope of modal operators have at most one free variable, are typically decidable. This only…

Treewidth is a well-known graph invariant with multiple interesting applications in combinatorics. On the practical side, many NP-complete problems are polynomial-time (sometimes even linear-time) solvable on graphs of bounded treewidth. On…

This article establishes that the split decomposition of graphs introduced by Cunnigham, is definable in Monadic Second-Order Logic.This result is actually an instance of a more general result covering canonical graph decompositions like…

Our main contributions can be divided in three parts: (1) Fixpoint extensions of first-order logic: we give a precise syntactic and semantic characterization of the relationship between $\mathrm{FO(TC^1)}$ and $\mathrm{FO(LFP)}$; (2)…

We study probabilistic complexity classes and questions of derandomisation from a logical point of view. For each logic L we introduce a new logic BPL, bounded error probabilistic L, which is defined from L in a similar way as the…

Dynamic programming on path and tree decompositions of graphs is a technique that is ubiquitous in the field of parameterized and exponential-time algorithms. However, one of its drawbacks is that the space usage is exponential in the…

For finite graphs, path-width is an interesting and useful concept, but if we extend it to infinite graphs in the most obvious way (by making the indexing path infinite), it does not work nicely. The simplest extension that works nicely is…

We study an abstract notion of tree structure which lies at the common core of various tree-like discrete structures commonly used in combinatorics: trees in graphs, order trees, nested subsets of a set, tree-decompositions of graphs and…

We develop an algebraic notion of recognizability for languages of words indexed by countable linear orderings. We prove that this notion is effectively equivalent to definability in monadic second-order (MSO) logic. We also provide three…

This thesis investigates the central role of homomorphism problems (structure-preserving maps) in two complementary domains: database querying over finite, graph-shaped data, and constraint solving over (potentially infinite) structures.…

Treewidth is a parameter that measures how tree-like a relational instance is, and whether it can reasonably be decomposed into a tree. Many computation tasks are known to be tractable on databases of small treewidth, but computing the…

We study FO+, a fragment of first-order logic on finite words, where monadic predicates can only appear positively. We show that there is a FO-definable language that is monotone in monadic predicates but not definable in FO+. This provides…

We prove that graphs G, G' satisfy the same sentences of first-order logic with counting of quantifier rank at most k if and only if they are homomorphism-indistinguishable over the class of all graphs of tree depth at most k. Here G, G'…