Robust Contraction Decomposition for Minor-Free Graphs and Its Applications

Abstract

We prove a robust contraction decomposition theorem for H-minor-free graphs, which states that given an H-minor-free graph G and an integer p, one can partition in polynomial time the vertices of G into p sets Z₁,… ,Z_p such that tw(G/(Z_i ⧵ Z')) = O(p + |Z'|) for all i ∈ [p] and Z' ⊆ Z_i. Here, tw(⋅) denotes the treewidth of a graph and G/(Z_i ⧵ Z') denotes the graph obtained from G by contracting all edges with both endpoints in Z_i ⧵ Z'.
Our result generalizes earlier results by Klein [SICOMP 2008] and Demaine et al. [STOC 2011] based on partitioning E(G), and some recent theorems for planar graphs by Marx et al. [SODA 2022], for bounded-genus graphs (more generally, almost-embeddable graphs) by Bandyapadhyay et al. [SODA 2022], and for unit-disk graphs by Bandyapadhyay et al. [SoCG 2022].
The robust contraction decomposition theorem directly results in parameterized algorithms with running time 2^{Õ(√k)} ⋅ n^{O(1)} or n^{O(√k)} for every vertex/edge deletion problems on H-minor-free graphs that can be formulated as Permutation CSP Deletion or 2-Conn Permutation CSP Deletion. Consequently, we obtain the first subexponential-time parameterized algorithms for Subset Feedback Vertex Set, Subset Odd Cycle Transversal, Subset Group Feedback Vertex Set, 2-Conn Component Order Connectivity on H-minor-free graphs. For other problems which already have subexponential-time parameterized algorithms on H-minor-free graphs (e.g., Odd Cycle Transversal, Vertex Multiway Cut, Vertex Multicut, etc.), our theorem gives much simpler algorithms of the same running time.