2026-07-25T21:10:04Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:23171 2025-10-02T12:41:50Z ddc:004 open_access

Polychromatic Coloring of Tuples in Hypergraphs Biniaz, Ahmad De Carufel, Jean-Lou Maheshwari, Anil Smid, Michiel Smorodinsky, Shakhar Stojaković, Miloš Hypergraph Coloring Polychromatic Coloring Geometric Hypergraphs Cover Decomposable Hypergraphs Epsilon Nets A hypergraph H consists of a set V of vertices and a set E of hyperedges that are subsets of V. A t-tuple of H is a subset of t vertices of V. A t-tuple k-coloring of H is a mapping of its t-tuples into k colors. A coloring is called (t,k,f)-polychromatic if each hyperedge of E that has at least f vertices contains tuples of all the k colors. Let f_H(t,k) be the minimum f such that H has a (t,k,f)-polychromatic coloring. For a family of hypergraphs ℋ let f_H(t,k) be the maximum f_H(t,k) over all hypergraphs H in H. Determining f_H(t,k) has been an active research direction in recent years. This is challenging even for t = 1. We present several new results in this direction for t ≥ 2. - Let H be the family of hypergraphs H that is obtained by taking any set P of points in ℝ², setting V: = P and E: = {d ∩ P: d is a disk in ℝ²}. We prove that f_ H(2,k) ≤ 3.7^k, that is, the pairs of points (2-tuples) can be k-colored such that any disk containing at least 3.7^k points has pairs of all colors. We generalize this result to points and balls in higher dimensions. - For the family H of hypergraphs that are defined by grid vertices and axis-parallel rectangles in the plane, we show that f_H(2,k) ≤ √{ck ln k} for some constant c. We then generalize this to higher dimensions, to other shapes, and to tuples of larger size. - For the family H of shrinkable hypergraphs of VC-dimension at most d we prove that f_ H(d+1,k) ≤ c^k for some constant c = c(d). Towards this bound, we obtain a result of independent interest: Every hypergraph with n vertices and with VC-dimension at most d has a (d+1)-tuple T of depth at least n/c, i.e., any hyperedge that contains T also contains n/c other vertices. - For the relationship between t-tuple coloring and vertex coloring in any hypergraph H we establish the inequality 1/e⋅ tk^{1/t} ≤ f_H(t,k) ≤ f_H(1,tk^{1/t}). For the special case of k = 2, referred to as the bichromatic coloring, we prove that t+1 ≤ f_H(t,2) ≤ max{f_H(1,2), t+1}; this improves upon the previous best known upper bound. - We study the relationship between tuple coloring and epsilon nets. In particular we show that if f_H(1,k) = O(k) for a hypergraph H with n vertices, then for any 0 < ε < 1 the t-tuples of H can be partitioned into Ω((εn/t)^t) ε-t-nets. This bound is tight when t is a constant. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Ahmad Biniaz and Jean-Lou De Carufel and Anil Maheshwari and Michiel Smid and Shakhar Smorodinsky and Miloš Stojaković 2025 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 332, 41st International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2025) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.19 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231718 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.19 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode