Let 𝒟 be a set family that is the solution domain of some combinatorial problem. The max-min diversification problem on 𝒟 is the problem to select k sets from 𝒟 such that the Hamming distance between any two selected sets is at least d. FPT algorithms parameterized by k+𝓁, where 𝓁 = max_{D ∈ 𝒟}|D|, and k+d have been actively studied recently for several specific domains. This paper provides unified algorithmic frameworks to solve this problem. Specifically, for each parameterization k+𝓁 and k+d, we provide an FPT oracle algorithm for the max-min diversification problem using oracles related to 𝒟. We then demonstrate that our frameworks provide the first FPT algorithms on several new domains 𝒟, including the domain of t-linear matroid intersection, almost 2-SAT, minimum edge s,t-flows, vertex sets of s,t-mincut, vertex sets of edge bipartization, and Steiner trees. We also demonstrate that our frameworks generalize most of the existing domain-specific tractability results. Our main technical breakthrough is introducing the notion of max-distance sparsifier of 𝒟, a domain on which the max-min diversification problem is equivalent to the same problem on the original domain 𝒟. The core of our framework is to design FPT oracle algorithms that construct a constant-size max-distance sparsifier of 𝒟. Using max-distance sparsifiers, we provide FPT algorithms for the max-min and max-sum diversification problems on 𝒟, as well as k-center and k-sum-of-radii clustering problems on 𝒟, which are also natural problems in the context of diversification and have their own interests.
@InProceedings{kumabe:LIPIcs.ESA.2025.46, author = {Kumabe, Soh}, title = {{Max-Distance Sparsification for Diversification and Clustering}}, booktitle = {33rd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2025)}, pages = {46:1--46:14}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-395-9}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2025}, volume = {351}, editor = {Benoit, Anne and Kaplan, Haim and Wild, Sebastian and Herman, Grzegorz}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2025.46}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-245146}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2025.46}, annote = {Keywords: Fixed-Parameter Tractability, Diversification, Clustering} }
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