Spanning Adjacency Oracles in Sublinear Time

Suppose we are given an n-node, m-edge input graph G, and the goal is to compute a spanning subgraph H on O(n) edges. This can be achieved in linear O(m + n) time via breadth-first search. But can we hope for sublinear runtime in some range of parameters - for example, perhaps O(n^{1.9}) worst-case runtime, even when the input graph has n² edges? If the goal is to return H as an adjacency list, there are simple lower bounds showing that Ω(m + n) runtime is necessary. If the goal is to return H as an adjacency matrix, then we need Ω(n²) time just to write down the entries of the output matrix. However, we show that neither of these lower bounds still apply if instead the goal is to return H as an implicit adjacency matrix, which we call an adjacency oracle. An adjacency oracle is a data structure that gives a user the illusion that an adjacency matrix has been computed: it accepts edge queries (u, v), and it returns in near-constant time a bit indicating whether or not (u, v) ∈ E(H). Our main result is that, for any 0 < ε < 1, one can construct an adjacency oracle for a spanning subgraph on at most (1+ε)n edges, in Õ(n ε^{-1}) time (hence sublinear time on input graphs with m ≫ n edges), and that this construction time is near-optimal. Additional results include constructions of adjacency oracles for k-connectivity certificates and spanners, which are similarly sublinear on dense-enough input graphs. Our adjacency oracles are closely related to Local Computation Algorithms (LCAs) for graph sparsifiers; they can be viewed as LCAs with some computation moved to a preprocessing step, in order to speed up queries. Our oracles imply the first LCAs for computing sparse spanning subgraphs of general input graphs in Õ(n) query time, which works by constructing our adjacency oracle, querying it once, and then throwing the rest of the oracle away. This addresses an open problem of Rubinfeld [CSR '17].