LIPIcs.IPEC.2023.28.pdf
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We study a new graph separation problem called Multiway Near-Separator. Given an undirected graph G, integer k, and terminal set T ⊆ V(G), it asks whether there is a vertex set S ⊆ V(G) ⧵ T of size at most k such that in graph G-S, no pair of distinct terminals can be connected by two pairwise internally vertex-disjoint paths. Hence each terminal pair can be separated in G-S by removing at most one vertex. The problem is therefore a generalization of (Node) Multiway Cut, which asks for a vertex set for which each terminal is in a different component of G-S. We develop a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm for Multiway Near-Separator running in time 2^{𝒪(k log k)} ⋅ n^{𝒪(1)}. Our algorithm is based on a new pushing lemma for solutions with respect to important separators, along with two problem-specific ingredients. The first is a polynomial-time subroutine to reduce the number of terminals in the instance to a polynomial in the solution size k plus the size of a given suboptimal solution. The second is a polynomial-time algorithm that, given a graph G and terminal set T ⊆ V(G) along with a single vertex x ∈ V(G) that forms a multiway near-separator, computes a 14-approximation for the problem of finding a multiway near-separator not containing x.
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