English

Feedback vertex sets of digraphs with bounded maximum degree

Combinatorics 2025-12-02 v1

Abstract

A digraph DD is an oriented graph if DD does not have a pair of opposite arcs. The degree of a vertex vv of DD is the sum of the in-degree and out-degree of v.v. Let fvs(D)fvs(D) be the minimum number of vertices whose deletion from DD makes it acyclic. Let DD be a digraph with nn vertices and maximum degree Δ\Delta. We prove the following bounds. If DD is an oriented graph, then fvs(D)3n7fvs(D)\leq \frac{3n}{7} when Δ4\Delta\le 4 and fvs(D)n2fvs(D)\leq \frac{n}{2} when Δ5\Delta\le 5. If DD is a connected digraph, Δ4\Delta\le 4 and DD is not obtained from an odd undirected cycle by replacing every edge with the pair of opposite arcs with the same endvertices, then fvs(D)n2fvs(D)\leq \frac{n}{2}. If DD is an arbitrary digraph with Δ5\Delta\le 5 then fvs(D)2n3.fvs(D)\leq \frac{2n}{3}. Note that all the above bounds are tight.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.01676,
  title  = {Feedback vertex sets of digraphs with bounded maximum degree},
  author = {Jiangdong Ai and Gregory Gutin and Xiangzhou Liu and Anders Yeo and Yacong Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.01676},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:03:45.576Z