A Simple Algorithm for the Graph Minor Decomposition -- Logic meets Structural Graph Theory
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A key result of Robertson and Seymour’s graph minor theory is a structure theorem stating that all graphs excluding some fixed graph as a minor have a tree decomposition into pieces that are almost embeddable in a fixed surface. Most algorithmic applications of graph minor theory rely on an algorithmic version of this result. However, the known algorithms for computing such graph minor decompositions heavily rely on the very long and complicated proofs of the existence of such decompositions, essentially they retrace these proofs and show that all steps are algorithmic. In this paper, we give a simple quadratic time algorithm for computing graph minor decompositions. The best previously known algorithm due to Kawarabayashi and Wollan runs in cubic time and is far more complicated. Our algorithm combines techniques from logic and structural graph theory, or more precisely, a variant of Courcelle’s Theorem stating that monadic second-order logic formulas can be evaluated in linear time on graphs of bounded tree width and Robertson and Seymour’s so called Weak Structure Theorem.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it