{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/an-approximation-algorithm-for-zero-forcing","title":"An approximation algorithm for zero forcing","arxiv_id":"2402.08866","date":"2024-02-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ben Cameron","Jeannette Janssen","Rogers Matthew","Zhiyuan Zhang"],"abstract":"We give an algorithm that finds a zero forcing set which approximates the optimal size by a factor of $\\text{pw}(G)+1$, where $\\text{pw}(G)$ is the pathwidth of $G$. Starting from a path decomposition, the algorithm runs in $O(nm)$ time, where $n$ and $m$ are the order and size of the graph, respectively. As a corollary, we obtain a new upper bound on the zero forcing number in terms of the fort number and the pathwidth. The algorithm is based on a correspondence between zero forcing sets and forcing arc sets. This correspondence leads to a new bound on the zero forcing number in terms of vertex cuts, and to new, short proofs for known bounds on the zero forcing number.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08866v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.08866v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"an-approximation-algorithm-for-zero-forcing","repo_url":"https://github.com/owenzzy/cjmz_zf","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}