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We prove that every graph $G$ with minimum degree at least $k\geq 2$ contains a cycle $C$ that is dense in several respects. First, it has at least $k+1$ vertices each having at least $k$ neighbors in $C$ (so $C$ has at least $\frac{(k+1)(k-2)}{2}$ chords). The inequality is tight and provides a sharp upper bound for the chromatic number of graphs where all cycles have less than $\ell$ chords for all $\ell \geq 0$. Then, we show that some edges of $C$ can be contracted to obtain a graph with high minimum degree (we call such a minor of $C$ a \emph{cyclic minor}). We then investigate further cycles having cliques as cyclic minors, and show that minimum degree at least $O(k^2)$ guarantees a cyclic $K_k$-minor.

Lov\'{a}sz et al. proved that every $6$-edge-connected graph has a nowhere-zero $3$-flow. In fact, they proved a more technical statement which says that there exists a nowhere zero $3$-flow that extends the flow prescribed on the incident edges of a single vertex $z$ with bounded degree. We extend this theorem of Lov\'{a}sz et al. to allow $z$ to have arbitrary degree, but with the additional assumption that there is another vertex $x$ with large degree and no small cut separating $x$ and $z$. Using this theorem, we prove two results regarding the generation of minimal graphs with the property that prescribing the edges incident to a vertex with specific flow does not extend to a nowhere-zero $3$-flow. We use this to further strengthen the theorem of Lov\'{a}sz et al., as well as make progress on a conjecture of Li et al., Comment: 51 pages

Through computer-assisted enumeration, we list minimal obstructions for 5-choosability of graphs on the torus with the following additional property: There exists a cyclic system of non-contractible triangles around the torus where the consecutive triangles are at distance at most four. This condition is satisfied by all previously known obstructions, and we verify that there are no additional obstructions with this property. This supports the conjecture that a toroidal graph is 5-choosable if and only if it is 5-colorable., Comment: 13 pages

A connected graph G is 3-flow-critical if G does not have a nowhere-zero 3-flow, but every proper contraction of G does. We prove that every n-vertex 3-flow-critical graph other than K_2 and K_4 has at least 5n/3 edges. This bound is tight up to lower-order terms, answering a question of Li et al. (2022). It also generalizes the result of Koester (1991) on the maximum average degree of 4-critical planar graphs., Comment: 9 pages, no figures

We consider the 4-precoloring extension problem in \emph{planar near-Eulerian-triangulations}, i.e., plane graphs where all faces except possibly for the outer one have length three, all vertices not incident with the outer face have even degree, and exactly the vertices incident with the outer face are precolored. We give a necessary topological condition for the precoloring to extend, and give a complete characterization when the outer face has length at most five and when all vertices of the outer face have odd degree and are colored using only three colors., Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures, extended abstract appeared in EuroComb 2023

We show that $\limsup |E(G)|/|V(G)| = 2.5$ over all $4$-critical planar graphs $G$, answering a question of Gr\"unbaum from 1988., Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures

We show that Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graphs $G(n,p)$ with constant density $p<1$ have correspondence chromatic number $O(n/\sqrt{\log n})$; this matches a prediction from linear Hadwiger's conjecture for correspondence coloring. The proof follows from a simple sufficient condition for correspondence colorability in terms of the numbers of independent sets.

The maximum edge colouring problem considers the maximum colour assignment to edges of a graph under the condition that every vertex has at most a fixed number of distinct coloured edges incident on it. If that fixed number is $q$ we call the colouring a maximum edge $q$-colouring. The problem models a non-overlapping frequency channel assignment question on wireless networks. The problem has also been studied from a purely combinatorial perspective in the graph theory literature. We study the question when the input graph is sparse. We show the problem remains $NP$-hard on $1$-apex graphs. We also show that there exists $PTAS$ for the problem on minor-free graphs. The $PTAS$ is based on a recently developed Baker game technique for proper minor-closed classes, thus avoiding the need to use any involved structural results. This further pushes the Baker game technique beyond the problems expressible in the first-order logic., Comment: 10 pages, to appear in the proceedings of WG 2023

Esperet and Joret proved that planar graphs with bounded maximum degree are 3-colorable with bounded clustering. Liu and Wood asked whether the conclusion holds with the assumption of the bounded maximum degree replaced by assuming that no two vertices have many common neighbors. We answer this question in positive, in the following stronger form: Let P''_t be the complete join of two isolated vertices with a path on t vertices. For any surface Sigma, a subgraph-closed class of graphs drawn on Sigma is 3-choosable with bounded clustering if and only if there exists t such that P''_t does not belong to the class., Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures

We investigate a fundamental vertex-deletion problem called (Induced) Subgraph Hitting: given a graph $G$ and a set $\mathcal{F}$ of forbidden graphs, the goal is to compute a minimum-sized set $S$ of vertices of $G$ such that $G-S$ does not contain any graph in $\mathcal{F}$ as an (induced) subgraph. This is a generic problem that encompasses many well-known problems that were extensively studied on their own, particularly (but not only) from the perspectives of both approximation and parameterization. In this paper, we study the approximability of the problem on a large variety of graph classes. Our first result is a linear-time $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation reduction from (Induced) Subgraph Hitting on any graph class $\mathcal{G}$ of bounded expansion to the same problem on bounded degree graphs within $\mathcal{G}$. This directly yields linear-size $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation lossy kernels for the problems on any bounded-expansion graph classes. Our second result is a linear-time approximation scheme for (Induced) Subgraph Hitting on any graph class $\mathcal{G}$ of polynomial expansion, based on the local-search framework of Har-Peled and Quanrud [SICOMP 2017]. This approximation scheme can be applied to a more general family of problems that aim to hit all subgraphs satisfying a certain property $\pi$ that is efficiently testable and has bounded diameter. Both of our results have applications to Subgraph Hitting (not induced) on wide classes of geometric intersection graphs, resulting in linear-size lossy kernels and (near-)linear time approximation schemes for the problem., Comment: 52 pages, subsuming the article arXiv:2304.12789

Let $\pi$ be a property of pairs $(G,Z)$, where $G$ is a graph and $Z\subseteq V(G)$. In the \emph{minimum $\pi$-hitting set problem}, given an input graph $G$, we want to find a smallest set $X\subseteq V(G)$ such that $X$ intersects every set $Z\subseteq V(G)$ such that $(G,Z)$ has the property $\pi$. An important special case is that $\pi$ is satisfied by $(G,Z)$ exactly if $G[Z]$ is isomorphic to one of graphs in a finite set $\mathcal{F}$; in this \emph{minimum $\mathcal{F}$-hitting set} problem, $X$ needs to hit all appearances of the graphs from $\mathcal{F}$ as induced subgraphs of $G$. In this note, we show that the local search argument of Har-Peled and Quanrud gives a PTAS for the minimum $\mathcal{F}$-hitting set problem for graphs from any class with polynomial expansion. Moreover, we argue that the local search argument applies more generally to all properties $\pi$ such that one can test whether $X$ is a $\pi$-hitting set in polynomial time and $G[Z]$ has bounded diameter whenever $(G,Z)$ satisfies $\pi$; this is a common generalization of the minimum $\mathcal{F}$-hitting set problem and minimum $r$-dominating set problem. Finaly, we note that the analogous claim also holds for the dual problem of finding the maximum number of disjoint sets $Z$ such that $(G,Z)$ has the property $\pi$; this generalizes maximum $F$-matching, maximum induced $F$-matching, and maximum $r$-independent set problems., Comment: 12 pages, no figures

A graph drawn in a surface is a near-quadrangulation if the sum of the lengths of the faces different from 4-faces is bounded by a fixed constant. We leverage duality between colorings and flows to design an efficient algorithm for 3-precoloring-extension in near-quadrangulations of orientable surfaces. Furthermore, we use this duality to strengthen previously known sufficient conditions for 3-colorability of triangle-free graphs drawn in orientable surfaces., Comment: 53 pages, 15 figures

As one of the first applications of the polynomial method in combinatorics, Alon and Tarsi gave a way to prove that a graph is choosable (colorable from any lists of prescribed size). We describe an efficient way to implement this approach, making it feasible to test choosability of graphs with around 70 edges. We also show that in case that Alon-Tarsi method fails to show that the graph is choosable, further coefficients of the graph polynomial provide constraints on the list assignments from which the graph cannot be colored. This often enables us to confirm colorability from a given list assignment, or to decide choosability by testing just a few list assignments. The implementation can be found at https://gitlab.mff.cuni.cz/dvorz9am/alon-tarsi-method., Comment: 21 pages, no figures

We investigate the product structure of hereditary graph classes admitting strongly sublinear separators. We characterise such classes as subgraphs of the strong product of a star and a complete graph of strongly sublinear size. In a more precise result, we show that if any hereditary graph class $\mathcal{G}$ admits $O(n^{1-\epsilon})$ separators, then for any fixed $\delta\in(0,\epsilon)$ every $n$-vertex graph in $\mathcal{G}$ is a subgraph of the strong product of a graph $H$ with bounded tree-depth and a complete graph of size $O(n^{1-\epsilon+\delta})$. This result holds with $\delta=0$ if we allow $H$ to have tree-depth $O(\log\log n)$. Moreover, using extensions of classical isoperimetric inequalties for grids graphs, we show the dependence on $\delta$ in our results and the above $\text{td}(H)\in O(\log\log n)$ bound are both best possible. We prove that $n$-vertex graphs of bounded treewidth are subgraphs of the product of a graph with tree-depth $t$ and a complete graph of size $O(n^{1/t})$, which is best possible. Finally, we investigate the conjecture that for any hereditary graph class $\mathcal{G}$ that admits $O(n^{1-\epsilon})$ separators, every $n$-vertex graph in $\mathcal{G}$ is a subgraph of the strong product of a graph $H$ with bounded tree-width and a complete graph of size $O(n^{1-\epsilon})$. We prove this for various classes $\mathcal{G}$ of interest., Comment: v2: added bad news subsection; v3: removed section "Polynomial Expansion Classes" which had an error, added section "Lower Bounds", and added a new author; v4: minor revisions and corrections

We prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether a graph is the square of a 6-apex graph. This shows that the square root problem is not tractable for squares of sparse graphs (or even graphs from proper minor-closed classes)., Comment: 6 pages, no figures; v2: Corrected an author name

For an abelian group $\Gamma$, a graph $G$ is said to be $\Gamma$-flow-critical if $G$ does not admit a nowhere-zero $\Gamma$-flow, but for each edge $e\in E(G)$, the contraction $G/e$ has a nowhere-zero $\Gamma$-flow. A bound on the density of $Z_3$-flow-critical graphs drawn on a fixed surface is obtained, generalizing the planar case of the bound on the density of 4-critical graphs by Kostochka and Yancey., Comment: 24 pages, no figures; updated for the reviewer remarks

We prove that up to two exceptions, every connected subcubic triangle-free graph has fractional chromatic number at most 11/4. This is tight unless further exceptional graphs are excluded, and improves the known bound on the fractional chromatic number of subcubic triangle-free planar graphs., Comment: 60 pages, 46 figures

A partial orientation $\vec{H}$ of a graph $G$ is a weak $r$-guidance system if for any two vertices at distance at most $r$ in $G$, there exists a shortest path $P$ between them such that $\vec{H}$ directs all but one edge in $P$ towards this edge. In case $\vec{H}$ has bounded maximum outdegree, this gives an efficient representation of shortest paths of length at most $r$ in $G$. We show that graphs from many natural graph classes admit such weak guidance systems, and study the algorithmic aspects of this notion., Comment: 33 pages, no figures; v3: Added an improved approximation subject to VC-dimension constraints and an application for the approximation of distance domination and independence number

Two boxes in $\mathbb{R}^d$ are comparable if one of them is a subset of a translation of the other one. The comparable box dimension of a graph $G$ is the minimum integer $d$ such that $G$ can be represented as a touching graph of comparable axis-aligned boxes in $\mathbb{R}^d$. We show that proper minor-closed classes have bounded comparable box dimensions and explore further properties of this notion., Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, accepted for presentation at SoCG 2022

We show that intersection graphs of compact convex sets in R^n of bounded aspect ratio have asymptotic dimension at most 2n+1. More generally, we show this is the case for intersection graphs of systems of subsets of any metric space of Assouad-Nagata dimension n that satisfy the following condition: For each r,s>0 and every point p, the number of pairwise-disjoint elements of diameter at least s in the system that are at distance at most r from p is bounded by a function of r/s., Comment: 11 pages, no figures; v2: post-review version, 12 pages, 1 figure