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Hendrik Molter

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17 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Adaptive Manipulation for Coalitions in Knockout Tournaments

Juhi Chaudhary
Hendrik Molter
Meirav Zehavi

Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a priory known) probability. Due to their competitive nature, tournaments are prone to manipulation. We investigate the computational problem of determining whether, for a given tournament, a coalition has a manipulation strategy that increases the winning probability of a designated player above a given threshold. More precisely, in every round of the tournament, coalition players can strategically decide which games to throw based on the advancement of other players to the current round. We call this setting adaptive constructive coalition manipulation. To the best of our knowledge, while coalition manipulation has been studied in the literature, this is the first work to introduce adaptiveness to this context. We show that the above problem is hard for every complexity class in the polynomial hierarchy. On the algorithmic side, we show that the problem is solvable in polynomial time when the coalition size is a constant. Furthermore, we show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the coalition size and the size of a minimum player set that must include at least one player from each non-deterministic game. Lastly, we investigate a generalized setting where the tournament tree can be imbalanced.

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JAIR Journal 2025 Journal Article

Parameterized Analysis of Bribery in Challenge the Champ Tournaments

Juhi Chaudhary
Hendrik Molter
Meirav Zehavi

Challenge the champ tournaments are one of the simplest forms of competition, where a (initially selected) champ is repeatedly challenged by other players. If a player beats the champ, then that player is considered the new (current) champ. Each player in the competition challenges the current champ once in a fixed order. The champ of the last round is considered the winner of the tournament. We investigate a setting where players can be bribed to lower their winning probability against the initial champ. The goal is to maximize the probability of the initial champ winning the tournament by bribing the other players, while not exceeding a given budget for the bribes. Mattei et al. [Journal of Applied Logic, 2015] showed that the problem can be solved in pseudo-polynomial time, and that it is in XP when parameterized by the number of players. We show that the problem is weakly NP-hard and W[1]-hard when parameterized by the number of players. On the algorithmic side, we show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized either by the number of different bribe values or the number of different probability values. To this end, we establish several results that are of independent interest. In particular, we show that the product knapsack problem is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the number of items in the knapsack, and that constructive bribery for cup tournaments is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the number of players. Furthermore, we present a novel way of designing mixed integer linear programs, ensuring optimal solutions where all variables are integers.

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TCS Journal 2025 Journal Article

Temporal graph realization from fastest paths

Nina Klobas
George B. Mertzios
Hendrik Molter
Paul G. Spirakis

In this paper, we initiate the study of the temporal graph realization problem with respect to the fastest path durations among its vertices, while we focus on periodic temporal graphs. Given an n × n matrix D and a Δ ∈ N, the goal is to construct a Δ-periodic temporal graph with n vertices such that the duration of a fastest path from v i to v j is equal to D i, j, or to decide that such a temporal graph does not exist. The variations of the problem on static graphs have been well studied and understood since the 1960s (e. g. [Erdős and Gallai, 1960], [Hakimi and Yau, 1965]). As it turns out, the periodic temporal graph realization problem has a very different computational complexity behavior than its static (i. e. , non-temporal) counterpart. First, we show that the problem is NP-hard in general, but polynomial-time solvable if the so-called underlying graph is a tree. Building upon those results, we investigate its parameterized computational complexity with respect to structural parameters of the underlying static graph which measure the “tree-likeness”. We prove a tight classification between such parameters that allow fixed-parameter tractability (FPT) and those which imply W[1]-hardness. We show that our problem is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the feedback vertex number (and therefore also any smaller parameter such as treewidth, degeneracy, and cliquewidth) of the underlying graph, while we show that it is in FPT when parameterized by the feedback edge number (and therefore also any larger parameter such as maximum leaf number) of the underlying graph.

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MFCS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Temporal Graph Realization with Bounded Stretch

George B. Mertzios
Hendrik Molter
Nils Morawietz
Paul G. Spirakis

A periodic temporal graph, in its simplest form, is a graph in which every edge appears exactly once in the first Δ time steps, and then it reappears recurrently every Δ time steps, where Δ is a given period length. This model offers a natural abstraction of transportation networks where each transportation link connects two destinations periodically. From a network design perspective, a crucial task is to assign the time-labels on the edges in a way that optimizes some criterion. In this paper we introduce a very natural optimality criterion that captures how the temporal distances of all vertex pairs are "stretched", compared to their physical distances, i. e. their distances in the underlying static (non-temporal) graph. Given a static graph G, the task is to assign to each edge one time-label between 1 and Δ such that, in the resulting periodic temporal graph with period Δ, the duration of the fastest temporal path from any vertex u to any other vertex v is at most α times the distance between u and v in G. Here, the value of α measures how much the shortest paths are allowed to be stretched once we assign the periodic time-labels. Our results span three different directions: First, we provide a series of approximation and NP-hardness results. Second, we provide approximation and fixed-parameter algorithms. Among them, we provide a simple polynomial-time algorithm (the radius-algorithm) which always guarantees an approximation strictly smaller than Δ, and which also computes the optimum stretch in some cases. Third, we consider a parameterized local search extension of the problem where we are given the temporal labeling of the graph, but we are allowed to change the time-labels of at most k edges; for this problem we prove that it is W[2]-hard but admits an XP algorithm with respect to k.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

How to Make Knockout Tournaments More Popular?

Juhi Chaudhary
Hendrik Molter
Meirav Zehavi

Given a mapping from a set of players to the leaves of a complete binary tree (called a seeding), a knockout tournament is conducted as follows: every round, every two players with a common parent compete against each other, and the winner is promoted to the common parent; then, the leaves are deleted. When only one player remains, it is declared the winner. This is a popular competition format in sports, elections, and decision-making. Over the past decade, it has been studied intensively from both theoretical and practical points of view. Most frequently, the objective is to seed the tournament in a way that ``assists'' (or even guarantees) some particular player to win the competition. We introduce a new objective, which is very sensible from the perspective of the directors of the competition: maximize the profit or popularity of the tournament. Specifically, we associate a ``score'' with every possible match, and aim to seed the tournament to maximize the sum of the scores of the matches that take place. We focus on the case where we assume a total order on the players' strengths, and provide a wide spectrum of results on the computational complexity of the problem.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Parameterized Analysis of Bribery in Challenge the Champ Tournaments

Juhi Chaudhary
Hendrik Molter
Meirav Zehavi

Challenge the champ tournaments are one of the simplest forms of competition, where a (initially selected) champ is repeatedly challenged by other players. If a player beats the champ, then that player is considered the new (current) champ. Each player in the competition challenges the current champ once in a fixed order. The champ of the last round is considered the winner of the tournament. We investigate a setting where players can be bribed to lower their winning probability against the initial champ. The goal is to maximize the probability of the initial champ winning the tournament by bribing the other players, while not exceeding a given budget for the bribes. In previous work is was shown that the problem can be solved in pseudo-polynomial time, and that it is in XP when parameterized by the number of players. We show that the problem is weakly NP-hard and W[1]-hard when parameterized by the number of players. On the algorithmic side, we show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized either by the number of different bribe values or the number of different probability values. To this end, we establish several results that are of independent interest. In particular, we show that the product knapsack problem is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the number of items in the knapsack, and that constructive bribery for cup tournaments is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the number of players. Furthermore, we present a novel way of designing mixed integer linear programs, ensuring optimal solutions where all variables are integers.

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IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

In Which Graph Structures Can We Efficiently Find Temporally Disjoint Paths and Walks?

Pascal Kunz
Hendrik Molter
Meirav Zehavi

A temporal graph has an edge set that may change over discrete time steps, and a temporal path (or walk) must traverse edges that appear at increasing time steps. Accordingly, two temporal paths (or walks) are temporally disjoint if they do not visit any vertex at the same time. The study of the computational complexity of finding temporally disjoint paths or walks in temporal graphs has recently been initiated by Klobas et al. . This problem is motivated by applications in multi-agent path finding (MAPF), which include robotics, warehouse management, aircraft management, and traffic routing. We extend Klobas et al. ’s research by providing parameterized hardness results for very restricted cases, with a focus on structural parameters of the so-called underlying graph. On the positive side, we identify sufficiently simple cases where we can solve the problem efficiently. Our results reveal some surprising differences between the “path version” and the “walk version” (where vertices may be visited multiple times) of the problem, and answer several open questions posed by Klobas et al.

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TCS Journal 2023 Journal Article

Temporal interval cliques and independent sets

Danny Hermelin
Yuval Itzhaki
Hendrik Molter
Rolf Niedermeier

Temporal graphs have been recently introduced to model changes in a given network that occur throughout a fixed period of time. The Temporal Δ Clique problem, which generalizes the well known Clique problem to temporal graphs, has been studied in the context of finding nodes of interest in dynamic networks [TCS '16]. We introduce the Temporal Δ Independent Set problem, a temporal generalization of Independent Set. This problem is e. g. motivated in the context of finding conflict-free schedules for maximum subsets of tasks, that have certain (time-varying) constraints within a given time period. We are specifically interested in the case where each task needs to be performed in a certain time-interval on each day and two tasks are in conflict on a certain day if their time-intervals on that day overlap. This leads us to consider both problems on the restricted class of temporal unit interval graphs, i. e. , temporal graphs where each layer is a unit interval graph. We present several hardness results as well as positive results. On the algorithmic side, we provide constant-factor approximation algorithms for instances of both problems where τ, the total number of time steps (layers) of the temporal graph, and Δ, a parameter that allows us to model conflict tolerance, are constants. We develop an exact FPT algorithm for Temporal Δ Clique with respect to parameter τ + k. Finally, we use the notion of order preservation for temporal unit interval graphs that, informally, requires the intervals of every layer to obey a common ordering. For both problems, we provide an FPT algorithm parameterized by the size of minimum vertex deletion set to order preservation.

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MFCS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

The Complexity of Computing Optimum Labelings for Temporal Connectivity

Nina Klobas
George B. Mertzios
Hendrik Molter
Paul G. Spirakis

A graph is temporally connected if there exists a strict temporal path, i. e. , a path whose edges have strictly increasing labels, from every vertex u to every other vertex v. In this paper we study temporal design problems for undirected temporally connected graphs. The basic setting of these optimization problems is as follows: given a connected undirected graph G, what is the smallest number |λ| of time-labels that we need to add to the edges of G such that the resulting temporal graph (G, λ) is temporally connected? As it turns out, this basic problem, called Minimum Labeling (ML), can be optimally solved in polynomial time. However, exploiting the temporal dimension, the problem becomes more interesting and meaningful in its following variations, which we investigate in this paper. First we consider the problem Min. Aged Labeling (MAL) of temporally connecting the graph when we are given an upper-bound on the allowed age (i. e. , maximum label) of the obtained temporal graph (G, λ). Second we consider the problem Min. Steiner Labeling (MSL), where the aim is now to have a temporal path between any pair of "important" vertices which lie in a subset R ⊆ V, which we call the terminals. This relaxed problem resembles the problem Steiner Tree in static (i. e. , non-temporal) graphs. However, due to the requirement of strictly increasing labels in a temporal path, Steiner Tree is not a special case of MSL. Finally we consider the age-restricted version of MSL, namely Min. Aged Steiner Labeling (MASL). Our main results are threefold: we prove that (i) MAL becomes NP-complete on undirected graphs, while (ii) MASL becomes W[1]-hard with respect to the number |R| of terminals. On the other hand we prove that (iii) although the age-unrestricted problem MSL remains NP-hard, it is in FPT with respect to the number |R| of terminals. That is, adding the age restriction, makes the above problems strictly harder (unless P=NP or W[1]=FPT).

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Equitable Scheduling on a Single Machine

Klaus Heeger
Dan Hermelin
George B. Mertzios
Hendrik Molter
Rolf Niedermeier
Dvir Shabtay

We introduce a natural but seemingly yet unstudied generalization of the problem of scheduling jobs on a single machine so as to minimize the number of tardy jobs. Our generalization lies in simultaneously considering several instances of the problem at once. In particular, we have n clients over a period of m days, where each client has a single job with its own processing time and deadline per day. Our goal is to provide a schedule for each of the m days, so that each client is guaranteed to have their job meet its deadline in at least k ≤ m days. This corresponds to an equitable schedule where each client is guaranteed a minimal level of service throughout the period of m days. We provide a thorough analysis of the computational complexity of three main variants of this problem, identifying both efficient algorithms and worst-case intractability results.

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IJCAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Interference-free Walks in Time: Temporally Disjoint Paths

Nina Klobas
George B. Mertzios
Hendrik Molter
Rolf Niedermeier
Philipp Zschoche

We investigate the computational complexity of finding temporally disjoint paths or walks in temporal graphs. There, the edge set changes over discrete time steps and a temporal path (resp. walk) uses edges that appear at monotonically increasing time steps. Two paths (or walks) are temporally disjoint if they never use the same vertex at the same time; otherwise, they interfere. This reflects applications in robotics, traffic routing, or finding safe pathways in dynamically changing networks. On the one extreme, we show that on general graphs the problem is computationally hard. The "walk version" is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the number of routes. However, it is polynomial-time solvable for any constant number of walks. The "path version" remains NP-hard even if we want to find only two temporally disjoint paths. On the other extreme, restricting the input temporal graph to have a path as underlying graph, quite counterintuitively, we find NP-hardness in general but also identify natural tractable cases.

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MFCS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Temporal Reachability Minimization: Delaying vs. Deleting

Hendrik Molter
Malte Renken
Philipp Zschoche

We study spreading processes in temporal graphs, i. e. , graphs whose connections change over time. These processes naturally model real-world phenomena such as infectious diseases or information flows. More precisely, we investigate how such a spreading process, emerging from a given set of sources, can be contained to a small part of the graph. To this end we consider two ways of modifying the graph, which are (1) deleting connections and (2) delaying connections. We show a close relationship between the two associated problems and give a polynomial time algorithm when the graph has tree structure. For the general version, we consider parameterization by the number of vertices to which the spread is contained. Surprisingly, we prove W[1]-hardness for the deletion variant but fixed-parameter tractability for the delaying variant.

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MFCS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

The Complexity of Transitively Orienting Temporal Graphs

George B. Mertzios
Hendrik Molter
Malte Renken
Paul G. Spirakis
Philipp Zschoche

In a temporal network with discrete time-labels on its edges, entities and information can only "flow" along sequences of edges whose time-labels are non-decreasing (resp. increasing), i. e. along temporal (resp. strict temporal) paths. Nevertheless, in the model for temporal networks of [Kempe, Kleinberg, Kumar, JCSS, 2002], the individual time-labeled edges remain undirected: an edge e = {u, v} with time-label t specifies that "u communicates with v at time t". This is a symmetric relation between u and v, and it can be interpreted that the information can flow in either direction. In this paper we make a first attempt to understand how the direction of information flow on one edge can impact the direction of information flow on other edges. More specifically, naturally extending the classical notion of a transitive orientation in static graphs, we introduce the fundamental notion of a temporal transitive orientation and we systematically investigate its algorithmic behavior in various situations. An orientation of a temporal graph is called temporally transitive if, whenever u has a directed edge towards v with time-label t₁ and v has a directed edge towards w with time-label t₂ ≥ t₁, then u also has a directed edge towards w with some time-label t₃ ≥ t₂. If we just demand that this implication holds whenever t₂ > t₁, the orientation is called strictly temporally transitive, as it is based on the fact that there is a strict directed temporal path from u to w. Our main result is a conceptually simple, yet technically quite involved, polynomial-time algorithm for recognizing whether a given temporal graph 𝒢 is transitively orientable. In wide contrast we prove that, surprisingly, it is NP-hard to recognize whether 𝒢 is strictly transitively orientable. Additionally we introduce and investigate further related problems to temporal transitivity, notably among them the temporal transitive completion problem, for which we prove both algorithmic and hardness results.

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TCS Journal 2020 Journal Article

Temporal graph classes: A view through temporal separators

Till Fluschnik
Hendrik Molter
Rolf Niedermeier
Malte Renken
Philipp Zschoche

We investigate for temporal graphs the computational complexity of separating two distinct vertices s and z by vertex deletion. In a temporal graph, the vertex set is fixed but the edges have (discrete) time labels. Since the corresponding Temporal ( s, z ) -Separation problem is NP-complete, it is natural to investigate whether relevant special cases exist that are computationally tractable. To this end, we study restrictions of the underlying (static) graph—there we observe polynomial-time solvability in the case of bounded treewidth—as well as restrictions concerning the “temporal evolution” along the time steps. Systematically studying partially novel concepts in this direction, we identify sharp borders between tractable and intractable cases.

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AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Sliding Window Temporal Graph Coloring

George B. Mertzios
Hendrik Molter
Viktor Zamaraev

Graph coloring is one of the most famous computational problems with applications in a wide range of areas such as planning and scheduling, resource allocation, and pattern matching. So far coloring problems are mostly studied on static graphs, which often stand in stark contrast to practice where data is inherently dynamic and subject to discrete changes over time. A temporal graph is a graph whose edges are assigned a set of integer time labels, indicating at which discrete time steps the edge is active. In this paper we present a natural temporal extension of the classical graph coloring problem. Given a temporal graph and a natural number ∆, we ask for a coloring sequence for each vertex such that (i) in every sliding time window of ∆ consecutive time steps, in which an edge is active, this edge is properly colored (i. e. its endpoints are assigned two different colors) at least once during that time window, and (ii) the total number of different colors is minimized. This sliding window temporal coloring problem abstractly captures many realistic graph coloring scenarios in which the underlying network changes over time, such as dynamically assigning communication channels to moving agents. We present a thorough investigation of the computational complexity of this temporal coloring problem. More specifically, we prove strong computational hardness results, complemented by efficient exact and approximation algorithms. Some of our algorithms are linear-time fixed-parameter tractable with respect to appropriate parameters, while others are asymptotically almost optimal under the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH).

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MFCS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

The Complexity of Finding Small Separators in Temporal Graphs

Philipp Zschoche
Till Fluschnik
Hendrik Molter
Rolf Niedermeier

Temporal graphs are graphs with time-stamped edges. We study the problem of finding a small vertex set (the separator) with respect to two designated terminal vertices such that the removal of the set eliminates all temporal paths connecting one terminal to the other. Herein, we consider two models of temporal paths: paths that pass through arbitrarily many edges per time step (non-strict) and paths that pass through at most one edge per time step (strict). Regarding the number of time steps of a temporal graph, we show a complexity dichotomy (NP-hardness versus polynomial-time solvability) for both problem variants. Moreover we prove both problem variants to be NP-complete even on temporal graphs whose underlying graph is planar. We further show that, on temporal graphs with planar underlying graph, if additionally the number of time steps is constant, then the problem variant for strict paths is solvable in quasi-linear time. Finally, we introduce and motivate the notion of a temporal core (vertices whose incident edges change over time). We prove that the non-strict variant is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the size of the temporal core, while the strict variant remains NP-complete, even for constant-size temporal cores.

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ECAI Conference 2016 Conference Paper

h-Index Manipulation by Undoing Merges

René van Bevern
Christian Komusiewicz
Hendrik Molter
Rolf Niedermeier
Manuel Sorge
Toby Walsh

The h-index is an important bibliographic measure used to assess the performance of researchers. Van Bevern et al. [Artif. Intel. , to appear] showed that, despite computational worst-case hardness results, substantial manipulation of the h-index of Google Scholar author profiles is possible by merging articles. Complementing this work, we study the opposite operation, the splitting of articles, which is arguably the more natural operation for manipulation and which is also allowed within Google Scholar. We present numerous results on computational complexity (from linear-time algorithms to parameterized computational hardness results) and empirically indicate that at least small improvements of the h-index by splitting merged articles are easily achievable.

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