Yaowei Long

Bernhard Haeupler, Yaowei Long, Antti Roeyskoe et al.

A fault-tolerant distance labeling scheme assigns a label to each vertex and edge of an undirected weighted graph $G$ with $n$ vertices so that, for any edge set $F$ of size $|F| \leq f$, one can approximate the distance between $p$ and $q$ in $G \setminus F$ by reading only the labels of $F \cup \{p,q\}$. For any $k$, we present a deterministic polynomial-time scheme with $O(k^{4})$ approximation and $\tilde{O}(f^{4}n^{1/k})$ label size. This is the first scheme to achieve a constant approximation while handling any number of edge faults $f$, resolving the open problem posed by Dory and Parter [DP21]. All previous schemes provided only a linear-in-$f$ approximation [DP21, LPS25]. Our labeling scheme directly improves the state of the art in the simpler setting of distance sensitivity oracles. Even for just $f = Θ(\log n)$ faults, all previous oracles either have super-linear query time, linear-in-$f$ approximation [CLPR12], or exponentially worse $2^{{\rm poly}(k)}$ approximation dependency in $k$ [HLS24].

Yaowei Long, Sepideh Mahabadi, Sherry Sarkar et al.

In the online Steiner forest problem we are given a graph $G$, and a sequence of terminal pairs $(u_i,v_i)$ which arrive in an online fashion. We are asked to maintain a low-cost subgraph in which each $u_i$ is connected to $v_i$ for all the pairs that have arrived so far. If we are not allowed to delete edges from our solution, then the best possible competitive ratio is $Θ(\log n)$. In this work, we initiate the study of low-recourse algorithms for online Steiner forest. We give an algorithm that maintains a constant-competitive solution and has an amortized recourse of $O(\log n)$, i.e., inserts and deletes $O(\log n)$ edges per demand on average.

Xizhe Li, Yaowei Long, David Pidugu et al.

We give an improved connectivity oracle under vertex failures. After a set of $k$ vertices fails, our oracle performs an $O(k^{6})$-time update independent of the graph size $n$, and then answers pairwise connectivity queries in optimal $O(k)$ time. For constant $k$, it uses near-linear space and can be built in near-linear preprocessing time. In contrast, all prior oracles with $n$-independent update time[PSS+22, vdBS19] either require $Ω(n^{2})$ space or incur $2^{2^{O(k)}}$ update and query time. Moreover, their preprocessing time is polynomially large in $n$, far from near-linear. Our oracle builds on the unbreakable decomposition framework of[PSS+22], but introduces three new ingredients: (i) shortcutting over the tree decomposition to reduce space from quadratic to near-linear, (ii) bootstrapping that leverages $n$-dependent oracles internally to obtain near-linear preprocessing, and (iii) a new patch set mechanism that yields conditionally optimal $O(k)$ query time.