Papers › Incompressibility of H-free edge modification problems: Towards a dichotomy

Incompressibility of H-free edge modification problems: Towards a dichotomy

24 Apr 2020arXiv:2004.11761links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Dániel Marx, R. B. Sandeep

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

Given a graph G and an integer k, the H-free Edge Editing problem is to find whether there exists at most k pairs of vertices in G such that changing the adjacency of the pairs in G results in a graph without any induced copy of H. The existence of polynomial kernels for H-free Edge Editing received significant attention in the parameterized complexity literature. Nontrivial polynomial kernels are known to exist for some graphs H with at most 4 vertices, but starting from 5 vertices, polynomial kernels are known only if H is either complete or empty. This suggests the conjecture that there is no other H with at least 5 vertices were H-free Edge Editing admits a polynomial kernel. Towards this goal, we obtain a set ℋ of nine 5-vertex graphs such that if for every H∈ℋ, H-free Edge Editing is incompressible and the complexity assumption NP ⊈coNP/poly holds, then H-free Edge Editing is incompressible for every graph H with at least five vertices that is neither complete nor empty. That is, proving incompressibility for these nine graphs would give a complete classification of the kernelization complexity of H-free Edge Editing for every H with at least 5 vertices. We obtain similar result also for H-free Edge Deletion. Here the picture is more complicated due to the existence of another infinite family of graphs H where the problem is trivial (graphs with exactly one edge). We obtain a larger set ℋ of nineteen graphs whose incompressibility would give a complete classification of the kernelization complexity of H-free Edge Deletion for every graph H with at least 5 vertices. Analogous results follow also for the H-free Edge Completion problem by simple complementation.

PaperPDFCode

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections