Representative Sets and Irrelevant Vertices: New Tools for Kernelization

The existence of a polynomial kernel for Odd Cycle Transversal was a notorious open problem in parameterized complexity. Recently, this was settled by the present authors (Kratsch and Wahlstrom, SODA 2012), with a randomized polynomial kernel for the problem, using matroid theory to encode How questions over a set of terminals in size polynomial in the number of terminals (rather than the total graph size, which may be superpolynomially larger). In the current work we further establish the usefulness of matroid theory to kernelization by showing applications of a result on representative sets due to Lovasz (Combinatorial Surveys 1977) and Marx (TCS 2009). We show how representative sets can be used to give a polynomial kernel for the elusive Almost 2-sat problem (where the task is to remove at most k clauses to make a 2-CNF formula satisfiable), solving a major open problem in kernelization. We further apply the representative sets tool to the problem of finding irrelevant vertices in graph cut problems, that is, vertices which can be made undeletable without affecting the status of the problem. This gives the first significant progress towards a polynomial kernel for the Multiway Cut problem; in particular, we get a polynomial kernel for Multiway Cut instances with a bounded number of terminals. Both these kernelization results have significant spin-off effects, producing the first polynomial kernels for a range of related problems. More generally, the irrelevant vertex results have implications for covering min-cuts in graphs. In particular, given a directed graph and a set of terminals, we can find a set of size polynomial in the number of terminals (a cut-covering set) which contains a minimum vertex cut for every choice of sources and sinks from the terminal set. Similarly, given an undirected graph and a set of terminals, we can find a set of vertices, of size polynomial in the number of terminals, which contains a minimum multiway cut for every partition of the terminals into a bounded number of sets. Both results are polynomial time. We expect this to have further applications; in particular, we get direct, reduction rule-based kernelizations for all problems above, in contrast to the indirect compression-based kernel previously given for Odd Cycle Transversal. All our results are randomized, with failure probabilities which can be made exponentially small in the size of the input, due to needing a representation of a matroid to apply the representative sets tool.