Sebastian Wiederrecht

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 $W$.

Dario Cavallaro, Maximilian Gorsky, Stephan Kreutzer et al.

The Graph Minors Series of Robertson and Seymour forms the foundation of algorithmic structural graph theory, yielding fixed-parameter algorithms for problems such as Disjoint Paths, Rooted Minor Checking, and Folio. A key ingredient behind the fixed-parameter tractability of the $k$-Disjoint Paths problem is the irrelevant-vertex technique. This machinery is governed by the Vital Linkage Theorem and the so-called Linkage Function $\ell$. However, despite its foundational role, the best known bounds on the Linkage Function are enormous and are only implicitly understood. The quantitative bounds behind these results have traditionally been so large that the resulting algorithms are regarded as "galactic". Our main result is a general irrelevant-vertex theorem for a common generalisation of $k$-Disjoint Paths and Rooted Minor Checking for graphs of size at most $d,$ commonly called the $(k,d)$-Folio problem. Specifically, we show that for any graph $G$ in which the $k$ terminals are chosen from some set $R,$ if the treewidth of $G$ exceeds $β(k,b,d)\in$ $2^{{\bf poly}(b + d)}$ $\cdot {\bf poly}(k)$ then we can locate an irrelevant vertex for the $(k,d)$-Folio problem. Here, the quantity $b$ is the bidimensionality of $R,$ that is, the largest $b$ for which a $(b\times b)$-grid minor in $G$ can be rooted on $R$. Thus, the exponential component of the irrelevant-vertex threshold is driven by the bound on the bidimensionality, rather than by the number of terminals, and we argue that this dependence is essentially optimal up to polynomial factors. As a consequence, the Linkage Function satisfies $\ell(k) \in 2^{{\bf poly}(k)}$. Beyond its structural significance, our result yields improved parameter dependencies for algorithms for Disjoint Paths and Rooted Minor Checking}, and provides a quantitative improvement for a broad range of graph-minor-based algorithmic frameworks.