2026-07-21T23:35:08Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:16432 2024-03-06T10:57:28Z ddc:004 open_access

Backdoor Sets on Nowhere Dense SAT Lokshtanov, Daniel Panolan, Fahad Ramanujan, M. S. Fixed-parameter Tractability Satisfiability Backdoors Treewidth For a satisfiable CNF formula ϕ and an integer t, a weak backdoor set to treewidth-t is a set of variables such that there is an assignment to this set that reduces ϕ to a satisfiable formula that has an incidence graph of treewidth at most t. A natural research program in the work on fixed-parameter algorithms (FPT algorithms) for SAT is to delineate the tractability borders for the problem of detecting a small weak backdoor set to treewidth-t formulas. In this line of research, Gaspers and Szeider (ICALP 2012) showed that detecting a weak backdoor set of size at most k to treewidth-1 is W[2]-hard parameterized by k if the input is an arbitrary CNF formula. Fomin, Lokshtanov, Misra, Ramanujan and Saurabh (SODA 2015), showed that if the input is d-CNF, then detecting a weak backdoor set of size at most k to treewidth-t is fixed-parameter tractable (parameterized by k,t,d). These two results indicate that sparsity of the input plays a role in determining the parameterized complexity of detecting weak backdoor sets to treewidth-t. In this work, we take a major step towards characterizing the precise impact of sparsity on the parameterized complexity of this problem by obtaining algorithmic results for detecting small weak backdoor sets to treewidth-t for input formulas whose incidence graphs belong to a nowhere-dense graph class. Nowhere density provides a robust and well-understood notion of sparsity that is at the heart of several advances on model checking and structural graph theory. Moreover, nowhere-dense graph classes contain many well-studied graph classes such as bounded treewidth graphs, graphs that exclude a fixed (topological) minor and graphs of bounded expansion. Our main contribution is an algorithm that, given a formula ϕ whose incidence graph belongs to a fixed nowhere-dense graph class and an integer k, in time f(t,k)|ϕ|^O(1), either finds a satisfying assignment of ϕ, or concludes correctly that ϕ has no weak backdoor set of size at most k to treewidth-t. To obtain this algorithm, we develop a strategy that only relies on the fact that nowhere-dense graph classes are biclique-free. That is, for every nowhere-dense graph class, there is a p such that it is contained in the class of graphs that exclude K_{p,p} as a subgraph. This is a significant feature of our techniques since the class of biclique-free graphs also generalizes the class of graphs of bounded degeneracy, which are incomparable with nowhere-dense graph classes. As a result, our algorithm also generalizes the results of Fomin, Lokshtanov, Misra, Ramanujan and Saurabh (SODA 2015) for the special case of d-CNF formulas as input when d is fixed. This is because the incidence graphs of such formulas exclude K_{d+1,d+1} as a subgraph. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Daniel Lokshtanov and Fahad Panolan and M. S. Ramanujan 2022 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 229, 49th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2022) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.91 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-164323 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.91 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode