Evangelos Protopapas

Evangelos Protopapas, Dimitrios M. Thilikos, Sebastian Wiederrecht

We introduce the notion of colorful minors, which generalizes the classical concept of rooted minors in graphs. A $q$-colorful graph is defined as a pair $(G, χ),$ where $G$ is a graph and $χ$ assigns to each vertex a (possibly empty) subset of at most $q$ colors. The colorful minor relation enhances the classical minor relation by merging color sets at contracted edges and allowing the removal of colors from vertices. This framework naturally models algorithmic problems involving graphs with (possibly overlapping) annotated vertex sets. We develop a structural theory for colorful minors by establishing three core theorems characterizing $\mathcal{H}$-colorful minor-free graphs, where $\mathcal{H}$ consists either of a clique or a grid with all vertices assigned all colors, or of grids with colors segregated and ordered on the outer face. Our results reveal that when exclusion is imposed not only on graphs but also to the way colors are distributed in them, a more refined structural landscape appears. Leveraging our structural insights, we provide a complete classification -- parameterized by the number $q$ of colors -- of all colorful graphs that exhibit the Erdős-Pósa property with respect to colorful minors. On the algorithmic side, we deduce that colorful minor testing is fixed-parameter tractable. Together with the fact that the colorful minor relation forms a well-quasi-order, this implies that every colorful minor-monotone parameter on colorful graphs admits a fixed-parameter algorithm. Furthermore, we derive two algorithmic meta-theorems (AMTs) whose structural conditions are linked to extensions of treewidth and Hadwiger number on colorful graphs. Our results suggest how known AMTs can be extended to incorporate not only the structure of the input graph but also the way the colored vertices are distributed in it.

Christophe Paul, Evangelos Protopapas, Dimitrios M. Thilikos et al.

The Local Structure Theorem (LST) for Graph Minors roughly states that for every $H$-minor-free graph $G$ that contains a sufficiently large wall $W$, there is a small vertex subset $A,$ whose removal yields a graph that admits an "almost embedding" $δ$ on a surface $Σ$ on which $H$ does not embed. By almost embedding, we mean that there exists a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ whose vertex set is a subset of the vertex set of $G - A$ and an embedding of $\mathcal{H}$ on $Σ$ such that the drawing of each hyperedge of $\mathcal{H}$ corresponds to a cell of $δ,$ the boundary of each cell intersects only the vertices of the corresponding hyperedge, and all remaining vertices and edges of $G - A$ are drawn in the interior of cells. The cells corresponding to hyperedges of arity at least $4$, called vortices, are few in number and have small "depth", while "most" of the wall $W$ is disjoint from the vortices and is "grounded" in the embedding $δ$. Suppose that the subgraphs drawn inside each of the non-vortex cells are equipped with some finite index, i.e., each such cell is assigned a color from a finite set. We prove a version of the LST in which the set $C$ of colors assigned to the non-vortex cells exhibits "large" bidimensionality: $G - A$ contains a minor model of a large grid $Γ$ such that, for every color $α\in C$, the model of each vertex of $Γ$ contains the subgraph drawn within an $α$-colored cell. Moreover, $Γ$ can be chosen in a way that is "well-connected" to the original wall $W$.

Václav Blažej, Michał Pilipczuk, Evangelos Protopapas

Menger's Theorem is a fundamental result in graph theory. It states that if in a graph $G$ with distinguished sets of terminal vertices $S$ and $T$ there are no $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint $S$-$T$ paths, then there is a set of less than $k$ vertices that intersects every $S$-$T$ path. In this work, we give a coarse variant of this result for planar and bounded genus graphs. Precisely, we prove that for every surface $Σ$ there is a function $f\colon \mathbb{N}\times \mathbb{N}\to \mathbb{N}$ such that for every pair of integers $d,k\in \mathbb{N}$ and a $Σ$-embeddable graph $G$ with distinguished sets of terminal vertices $S$ and $T$, if $G$ does not contain a family of $k$ $S$-$T$ paths that are pairwise at distance larger than $d$, then there is a set $X$ consisting of at most $f(d,k)$ vertices of $G$ such that every $S$-$T$ path is at distance at most $d$ from a vertex of $X$. This partially answers questions of Nguyen, Scott, and Seymour [arXiv:2508.14332], who proved that such a result cannot hold in general graphs. A key ingredient of our proof is a structure theorem from the developing ''colorful'' graph minor theory, where the focus is on studying the structure in a graph relative to some fixed subsets of annotated vertices. In our case, these annotated vertices are $S$ and $T$.

Christophe Paul, Evangelos Protopapas, Dimitrios M. Thilikos

In a recent work, we introduced a parametric framework for obtaining obstruction characterizations of graph parameters with respect to a quasi-ordering $\leqslant$ on graphs. Towards this, we proposed the concepts of class obstruction, parametric obstruction, and universal obstruction as combinatorial objects that determine the approximate behaviour of a graph parameter. In this work, we explore its potential as a unifying framework for classifying graph parameters. Under this framework, we survey existing graph-theoretic results on many known graph parameters. Additionally, we provide some unifying results on their classification.