# Improved Guarantees for Vertex Sparsification in Planar Graphs

## TL;DR

This paper introduces new vertex sparsification techniques for planar graphs, providing improved size bounds for reachability and cut sparsifiers, with tight bounds and practical implications for graph compression.

## Contribution

It presents the first polynomial-size reachability-preserving minors for directed graphs and tight bounds for planar graphs, advancing graph sparsification theory.

## Key findings

- Directed graphs admit reachability-preserving minors of size O(k^3)
- Planar graphs with k terminals have cut sparsifiers of size O(k^2)
- Lower bounds show some graphs require Ω(k^2) vertices in sparsifiers.

## Abstract

Graph Sparsification aims at compressing large graphs into smaller ones while preserving important characteristics of the input graph. In this work we study Vertex Sparsifiers, i.e., sparsifiers whose goal is to reduce the number of vertices. We focus on the following notions: (1) Given a digraph $G=(V,E)$ and terminal vertices $K \subset V$ with $|K| = k$, a (vertex) reachability sparsifier of $G$ is a digraph $H=(V_H,E_H)$, $K \subset V_H$ that preserves all reachability information among terminal pairs. In this work we introduce the notion of reachability-preserving minors (RPMs) , i.e., we require $H$ to be a minor of $G$. We show any directed graph $G$ admits a RPM $H$ of size $O(k^3)$, and if $G$ is planar, then the size of $H$ improves to $O(k^{2} \log k)$. We complement our upper-bound by showing that there exists an infinite family of grids such that any RPM must have $\Omega(k^{2})$ vertices. (2) Given a weighted undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ and terminal vertices $K$ with $|K|=k$, an exact (vertex) cut sparsifier of $G$ is a graph $H$ with $K \subset V_H$ that preserves the value of minimum-cuts separating any bipartition of $K$. We show that planar graphs with all the $k$ terminals lying on the same face admit exact cut sparsifiers of size $O(k^{2})$ that are also planar. Our result extends to flow and distance sparsifiers. It improves the previous best-known bound of $O(k^22^{2k})$ for cut and flow sparsifiers by an exponential factor, and matches an $\Omega(k^2)$ lower-bound for this class of graphs.