Horiyama et al. (AAAI 2024) considered the problem of generating instances with a unique minimum vertex cover under certain conditions. The Pre-assignment for Uniquification of Minimum Vertex Cover problem (shortly PAU-VC) is the problem, for given a graph G, to find a minimum set S of vertices in G such that there is a unique minimum vertex cover of G containing S. We show that PAU-VC is fixed parameter tractable parameterized by clique-width, which improves an exponential algorithm for trees given by Horiyama et al. Among natural graph classes with unbounded clique-width, we show that the problem can be solved in polynomial time on split graphs and unit interval graphs.

In this paper, we present efficient algorithms for the single-source shortest path problem in weighted disk graphs. A disk graph is the intersection graph of a family of disks in the plane. Here, the weight of an edge is defined as the Euclidean distance between the centers of the disks corresponding to the endpoints of the edge. Given a family of $n$ disks in the plane whose radii lie in $[1,Ψ]$ and a source disk, we can compute a shortest path tree from a source vertex in the weighted disk graph in $O(n\log^2 n \log Ψ)$ time. Moreover, in the case that the radii of disks are arbitrarily large, we can compute a shortest path tree from a source vertex in the weighted disk graph in $O(n\log^4 n)$ time. This improves the best-known algorithm running in $O(n\log^6 n)$ time presented in ESA'23.

In this paper, we consider the Cycle Packing problem on unit disk graphs defined as follows. Given a unit disk graph G with n vertices and an integer k, the goal is to find a set of $k$ vertex-disjoint cycles of G if it exists. Our algorithm runs in time $2^{O(\sqrt k)}n^{O(1)}$. This improves the $2^{O(\sqrt k\log k)}n^{O(1)}$-time algorithm by Fomin et al. [SODA 2012, ICALP 2017]. Moreover, our algorithm is optimal assuming the exponential-time hypothesis.

An outerstring graph is the intersection graph of curves lying inside a disk with one endpoint on the boundary of the disk. We show that an outerstring graph with $n$ vertices has treewidth $O(α\log n)$, where $α$ denotes the arboricity of the graph, with an almost matching lower bound of $Ω(α\log (n/α))$. As a corollary, we show that a $t$-biclique-free outerstring graph has treewidth $O(t(\log t)\log n)$. This leads to polynomial-time algorithms for most of the central NP-complete problems such as \textsc{Independent Set}, \textsc{Vertex Cover}, \textsc{Dominating Set}, \textsc{Feedback Vertex Set}, \textsc{Coloring} for sparse outerstring graphs. Also, we can obtain subexponential-time (exact, parameterized, and approximation) algorithms for various NP-complete problems such as \textsc{Vertex Cover}, \textsc{Feedback Vertex Set} and \textsc{Cycle Packing} for (not necessarily sparse) outerstring graphs.

In this paper, we study fundamental parameterized problems such as $k$-Path/Cycle, Vertex Cover, Triangle Hitting Set, Feedback Vertex Set, and Cycle Packing for dynamic unit disk graphs. Given a vertex set $V$ changing dynamically under vertex insertions and deletions, our goal is to maintain data structures so that the aforementioned parameterized problems on the unit disk graph induced by $V$ can be solved efficiently. Although dynamic parameterized problems on general graphs have been studied extensively, no previous work focuses on unit disk graphs. In this paper, we present the first data structures for fundamental parameterized problems on dynamic unit disk graphs. More specifically, our data structure supports $2^{O(\sqrt{k})}$ update time and $O(k)$ query time for $k$-Path/Cycle. For the other problems, our data structures support $O(\log n)$ update time and $2^{O(\sqrt{k})}$ query time, where $k$ denotes the output size.

In this paper, we present an algorithm for computing a feedback vertex set of a unit disk graph of size $k$, if it exists, which runs in time $2^{O(\sqrt{k})}(n+m)$, where $n$ and $m$ denote the numbers of vertices and edges, respectively. This improves the $2^{O(\sqrt{k}\log k)}n^{O(1)}$-time algorithm for this problem on unit disk graphs by Fomin et al. [ICALP 2017]. Moreover, our algorithm is optimal assuming the exponential-time hypothesis. Also, our algorithm can be extended to handle geometric intersection graphs of similarly sized fat objects without increasing the running time.