Connectivity Oracles for Predictable Vertex Failures
This work addresses the connectivity oracle problem for researchers in graph algorithms and data structures, offering incremental improvements by incorporating predictions to potentially enhance efficiency in dynamic settings.
The paper tackles the problem of designing connectivity oracles for undirected graphs that support vertex failures, aiming to improve query time by leveraging predictions about which vertices will fail. It results in a data structure with preprocessing time of O~(d|E|), update time of O~(η^4), and query time of O(η), where d is the predicted failure set size and η is the prediction error.
The problem of designing connectivity oracles supporting vertex failures is one of the basic data structures problems for undirected graphs. It is already well understood: previous works [Duan--Pettie STOC'10; Long--Saranurak FOCS'22] achieve query time linear in the number of failed vertices, and it is conditionally optimal as long as we require preprocessing time polynomial in the size of the graph and update time polynomial in the number of failed vertices. We revisit this problem in the paradigm of algorithms with predictions: we ask if the query time can be improved if the set of failed vertices can be predicted beforehand up to a small number of errors. More specifically, we design a data structure that, given a graph $G=(V,E)$ and a set of vertices predicted to fail $\widehat{D} \subseteq V$ of size $d=|\widehat{D}|$, preprocesses it in time $\tilde{O}(d|E|)$ and then can receive an update given as the symmetric difference between the predicted and the actual set of failed vertices $\widehat{D} \triangle D = (\widehat{D} \setminus D) \cup (D \setminus \widehat{D})$ of size $η= |\widehat{D} \triangle D|$, process it in time $\tilde{O}(η^4)$, and after that answer connectivity queries in $G \setminus D$ in time $O(η)$. Viewed from another perspective, our data structure provides an improvement over the state of the art for the \emph{fully dynamic subgraph connectivity problem} in the \emph{sensitivity setting} [Henzinger--Neumann ESA'16]. We argue that the preprocessing time and query time of our data structure are conditionally optimal under standard fine-grained complexity assumptions.