Almost Tight Lower Bounds for Hard Cutting Problems in Embedded Graphs

We prove essentially tight lower bounds, conditionally to the Exponential Time Hypothesis, for two fundamental but seemingly very different cutting problems on surface-embedded graphs: the Shortest Cut Graph problem and the Multiway Cut problem. A cut graph of a graph G embedded on a surface S is a subgraph of G whose removal from S leaves a disk. We consider the problem of deciding whether an unweighted graph embedded on a surface of genus G has a cut graph of length at most a given value. We prove a time lower bound for this problem of n Ω( g log g ) conditionally to the ETH. In other words, the first n O(g) -time algorithm by Erickson and Har-Peled [SoCG 2002, Discr. Comput. Geom. 2004] is essentially optimal. We also prove that the problem is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the genus, answering a 17-year-old question of these authors. A multiway cut of an undirected graph G with t distinguished vertices, called terminals , is a set of edges whose removal disconnects all pairs of terminals. We consider the problem of deciding whether an unweighted graph G has a multiway cut of weight at most a given value. We prove a time lower bound for this problem of n Ω( gt + g 2 + t log ( g + t )) , conditionally to the ETH, for any choice of the genus g ≥ 0 of the graph and the number of terminals t ≥ 4. In other words, the algorithm by the second author [Algorithmica 2017] (for the more general multicut problem) is essentially optimal; this extends the lower bound by the third author [ICALP 2012] (for the planar case). Reductions to planar problems usually involve a gridlike structure. The main novel idea for our results is to understand what structures instead of grids are needed if we want to exploit optimally a certain value G of the genus.

Simplex Transformations and the Multiway Cut Problem

We consider multiway cut, a basic graph partitioning problem in which the goal is to find the minimum weight collection of edges disconnecting a given set of special vertices called terminals. Multiway cut admits a well-known simplex embedding relaxation, where rounding this embedding is equivalent to partitioning the simplex. Current best-known solutions to the problem are comprised of a mix of several different ingredients, resulting in intricate algorithms. Moreover, the best of these algorithms is too complex to fully analyze analytically, and a computer was partly used in verifying its approximation factor. We propose a new approach to simplex partitioning and the multiway cut problem based on general transformations of the simplex that allow dependencies between the different variables. Our approach admits much simpler algorithms and, in addition, yields an approximation guarantee for the multiway cut problem that (roughly) matches the current best computer-verified approximation factor.