Twin-width II: small classes

The recently introduced twin-width of a graph G is the minimum integer d such that G has a d-contraction sequence, that is, a sequence of | V ( G )| – 1 iterated vertex identifications for which the overall maximum number of red edges incident to a single vertex is at most d, where a red edge appears between two sets of identified vertices if they are not homogeneous in G (not fully adjacent nor fully non-adjacent). We show that if a graph admits a d -contraction sequence, then it also has a linear-arity tree of f ( d )-contractions, for some function f. Informally if we accept to worsen the twin-width bound, we can choose the next contraction from a set of Θ (| V ( G )|) pairwise disjoint pairs of vertices. This has two main consequences. First it permits to show that every bounded twin-width class is small, i. e. , has at most n! c n graphs labeled by [ n ], for some constant c. This unifies and extends the same result for bounded treewidth graphs [Beineke and Pippert, JCT '69], proper subclasses of permutations graphs [Marcus and Tardos, JCTA '04], and proper minor-free classes [Norine et al. , JCTB '06]. It implies in turn that bounded-degree graphs, interval graphs, and unit disk graphs have unbounded twin-width. The second consequence is an O (log n )-adjacency labeling scheme for bounded twin-width graphs, confirming several cases of the implicit graph conjecture. We then explore the small conjecture that, conversely, every small hereditary class has bounded twin-width. The conjecture passes many tests. Inspired by sorting networks of logarithmic depth, we show that log Θ (log log d ) n -subdivisions of K n (a small class when d is constant) have twin-width at most d. We obtain a rather sharp converse with a surprisingly direct proof: the log d +1 n -subdivision of K n has twin-width at least d. Secondly graphs with bounded stack or queue number (also small classes) have bounded twin-width. These sparse classes are surprisingly rich since they contain certain (small) classes of expanders. Thirdly we show that cubic expanders obtained by iterated random 2-lifts from K 4 [Bilu and Linial, Combinatorica '06] also have bounded twin-width. These graphs are related to so-called separable permutations and also form a small class. We suggest a promising connection between the small conjecture and group theory. Finally we define a robust notion of sparse twin-width. We show that for a hereditary class of bounded twin-width the five following conditions are equivalent: every graph in (1) is K t, t -fr ee for some fixed t, (2) has an adjacency matrix without a d-by-d division with a 1 entry in each d 2 cells for some fixed d, (3) has at most linearly many edges, (4) the subgraph closure of has bounded twin-width, and (5) has bounded expansion. We discuss how sparse classes with similar behavior with respect to clique subdivisions compare to bounded sparse twin-width.

Authors

• Édouard Bonnet
• Colin Geniet
• Eun Jung Kim 0002
• Stéphan Thomassé
• Rémi Watrigant

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