Fine-Grained Complexity of Multiple Domination and Dominating Patterns in Sparse Graphs
<|reference_start|>Fine-Grained Complexity of Multiple Domination and Dominating Patterns in Sparse Graphs: The study of domination in graphs has led to a variety of domination problems studied in the literature. Most of these follow the following general framework: Given a graph $G$ and an integer $k$, decide if there is a set $S$ of $k$ vertices such that (1) some inner property $\phi(S)$ (e.g., connectedness) is satisfied, and (2) each vertex $v$ satisfies some domination property $\rho(S, v)$ (e.g., there is an $s\in S$ that is adjacent to $v$).   Since many real-world graphs are sparse, we seek to determine the optimal running time of such problems in both the number $n$ of vertices and the number $m$ of edges in $G$. While the classic dominating set problem admits a rather limited improvement in sparse graphs (Fischer, K\"unnemann, Redzic SODA'24), we show that natural variants studied in the literature admit much larger speed-ups, with a diverse set of possible running times. Specifically, we obtain conditionally optimal algorithms for:   1) $r$-Multiple $k$-Dominating Set (each vertex must be adjacent to at least $r$ vertices in $S$): If $r\le k-2$, we obtain a running time of $(m/n)^{r} n^{k-r+o(1)}$ that is conditionally optimal assuming the 3-uniform hyperclique hypothesis. In sparse graphs, this fully interpolates between $n^{k-1\pm o(1)}$ and $n^{2\pm o(1)}$, depending on $r$. Curiously, when $r=k-1$, we obtain a randomized algorithm beating $(m/n)^{k-1} n^{1+o(1)}$ and we show that this algorithm is close to optimal under the $k$-clique hypothesis.   2) $H$-Dominating Set ($S$ must induce a pattern $H$). We conditionally settle the complexity of three such problems: (a) Dominating Clique ($H$ is a $k$-clique), (b) Maximal Independent Set of size $k$ ($H$ is an independent set on $k$ vertices), (c) Dominating Induced Matching ($H$ is a perfect matching on $k$ vertices).<|reference_end|>
@article{künnemann2024fine-grained,
    title={Fine-Grained Complexity of Multiple Domination and Dominating Patterns
  in Sparse Graphs},
    author={Marvin K"unnemann and Mirza Redzic},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.08037},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2409.08037},
    primaryClass={cs.DS}
}