Karolina Drabik

1paper

1 Paper

DSDec 29, 2025
Finding Diverse Solutions Parameterized by Cliquewidth

Karolina Drabik, Tomáš Masařík

Finding a few solutions for a given problem that are diverse, as opposed to finding a single best solution to solve the problem, has recently become a notable topic in theoretical computer science. Recently, Baste, Fellows, Jaffke, Masařík, Oliveira, Philip, and Rosamond showed that under a standard structural parameterization by treewidth, one can find a set of diverse solutions for many problems with only a very small additional cost [Artificial Intelligence 2022]. In this paper, we investigate a much stronger graph parameter, the cliquewidth, which can additionally describe some dense graph classes. Broadly speaking, it describes graphs that can be recursively constructed by a few operations defined on graphs whose vertices are divided into a bounded number of groups while each such group behaves uniformly with respect to any operation. We show that for any vertex problem, if we are given a dynamic program solving that problem on cliquewidth decomposition, we can modify it to produce a few solutions that are as diverse as possible with as little overhead as in the above-mentioned treewidth paper. As a consequence, we prove that a diverse version of any MSO$_1$ expressible problem can be solved in linear FPT time parameterized by the cliquewidth, the number of sought solutions, and the number of quantifiers in the formula, which was a natural missing piece in the complexity landscape of structural graph parameters and logic for the diverse problems. We prove our results allowing for a more general natural collection of diversity functions compared to only two mostly studied diversity functions previously. That might be of independent interest as a larger pool of different diversity functions can highlight various aspects of different solutions to a problem.