The Subgraph Isomorphism problem is of considerable importance in computer science. We examine the problem when the pattern graph H is of bounded treewidth, as occurs in a variety of applications. This problem has a well-known algorithm via color-coding that runs in time O(n^{tw(H)+1}) [Alon, Yuster, Zwick'95], where n is the number of vertices of the host graph G. While there are pattern graphs known for which Subgraph Isomorphism can be solved in an improved running time of O(n^{tw(H)+1-ε}) or even faster (e.g. for k-cliques), it is not known whether such improvements are possible for all patterns. The only known lower bound rules out time n^{o(tw(H) / log(tw(H)))} for any class of patterns of unbounded treewidth assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis [Marx'07]. In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of maximally hard pattern graphs H that require time n^{tw(H)+1-o(1)}. Specifically, under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH), a standard assumption from fine-grained complexity theory, we prove the following asymptotic statement for large treewidth t: For any ε > 0 there exists t ≥ 3 and a pattern graph H of treewidth t such that Subgraph Isomorphism on pattern H has no algorithm running in time O(n^{t+1-ε}). Under the more recent 3-uniform Hyperclique hypothesis, we even obtain tight lower bounds for each specific treewidth t ≥ 3: For any t ≥ 3 there exists a pattern graph H of treewidth t such that for any ε > 0 Subgraph Isomorphism on pattern H has no algorithm running in time O(n^{t+1-ε}). In addition to these main results, we explore (1) colored and uncolored problem variants (and why they are equivalent for most cases), (2) Subgraph Isomorphism for tw < 3, (3) Subgraph Isomorphism parameterized by pathwidth instead of treewidth, and (4) a weighted variant that we call Exact Weight Subgraph Isomorphism, for which we examine pseudo-polynomial time algorithms. For many of these settings we obtain similarly tight upper and lower bounds.
@InProceedings{bringmann_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2021.40, author = {Bringmann, Karl and Slusallek, Jasper}, title = {{Current Algorithms for Detecting Subgraphs of Bounded Treewidth Are Probably Optimal}}, booktitle = {48th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2021)}, pages = {40:1--40:16}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-195-5}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2021}, volume = {198}, editor = {Bansal, Nikhil and Merelli, Emanuela and Worrell, James}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2021.40}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-141095}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2021.40}, annote = {Keywords: subgraph isomorphism, treewidth, fine-grained complexity, hyperclique} }
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