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Forbidden Induced Subgraphs for Bounded Shrub-Depth and the Expressive Power of MSO

Author Nikolas Mählmann

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Finite Model Theory
Keywords
  • Shrub-Depth
  • Forbidden Induced Subgraphs
  • MSO
  • Stability Theory

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Abstract

The graph parameter shrub-depth is a dense analog of tree-depth. We characterize classes of bounded shrub-depth by forbidden induced subgraphs. The obstructions are well-controlled flips of large half-graphs and of disjoint unions of many long paths. Applying this characterization, we show that on every hereditary class of unbounded shrub-depth, MSO is more expressive than FO. This confirms a conjecture of [Gajarský and Hliněný; LMCS 2015] who proved that on classes of bounded shrub-depth FO and MSO have the same expressive power. Combined, the two results fully characterize the hereditary classes on which FO and MSO coincide, answering an open question by [Elberfeld, Grohe, and Tantau; LICS 2012].
Our work is inspired by the notion of stability from model theory. A graph class 𝒞 is MSO-stable, if no MSO-formula can define arbitrarily long linear orders in graphs from 𝒞. We show that a hereditary graph class is MSO-stable if and only if it has bounded shrub-depth. As a key ingredient, we prove that every hereditary class of unbounded shrub-depth FO-interprets the class of all paths. This improves upon a result of [Ossona de Mendez, Pilipczuk, and Siebertz; Eur. J. Comb. 2025] who showed the same statement for FO-transductions instead of FO-interpretations.

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Nikolas Mählmann. Forbidden Induced Subgraphs for Bounded Shrub-Depth and the Expressive Power of MSO. In 52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 334, pp. 167:1-167:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.167

Author Details

Nikolas Mählmann
  • University of Bremen, Germany

Funding

Supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with grant agreement No. 444419611.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Patrice Ossona de Mendez, Sebastian Siebertz, and Szymon Toruńczyk for fruitful discussions on the topic of this paper.

References

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