Graphs with no long claws: An improved bound for the analog of the Gy\'{a}rf\'{a}s' path argument

TL;DR

This paper improves the bound for a key structural property of $S_{t,t,t}$-free graphs, showing that only a constant number of neighborhood deletions are needed to achieve a useful graph decomposition.

Contribution

The authors refine previous results by reducing the number of neighborhood deletions from logarithmic to constant for $S_{t,t,t}$-free graphs.

Findings

Constant neighborhood deletions suffice for graph decomposition.

Improved bound enhances algorithmic applications for maximum weight independent set.

Refinement simplifies the structural analysis of $S_{t,t,t}$-free graphs.

Abstract

For a fixed integer $t \geq 1$, a ($t$-)long claw, denoted $S_{t,t,t}$, is the unique tree with three leaves, each at distance exactly $t$ from the vertex of degree three. Majewski et al. [ICALP 2022, ACM ToCT 2024] proved an analog of the Gy\'{a}rf\'{a}s' path argument for $S_{t,t,t}$-free graphs: given an $n$-vertex $S_{t,t,t}$-free graph, one can delete neighborhoods of $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ vertices so that the remainder admits an extended strip decomposition (an appropriate generalization of partition into connected components) into particles of multiplicatively smaller size. This statement has proven to be very useful in designing quasi-polynomial time algorithms for Maximum Weight Independent Set and related problems in $S_{t,t,t}$-free graphs. In this work, we refine the argument of Majewski et al. and show that a constant number of neighborhoods suffice.