Robustness of randomized rumour spreading

In this work we consider three well-studied broadcast protocols: push, pull and push&pull. A key property of all these models, which is also an important reason for their popularity, is that they are presumed to be very robust, since they are simple, randomized and, crucially, do not utilize explicitly the global structure of the underlying graph. While sporadic results exist, there has been no systematic theoretical treatment quantifying the robustness of these models. Here we investigate this question with respect to two orthogonal aspects: (adversarial) modifications of the underlying graph and message transmission failures. We explore in particular the following notion of local resilience: beginning with a graph, we investigate up to which fraction of the edges an adversary may delete at each vertex, so that the protocols need significantly more rounds to broadcast the information. Our main findings establish a separation among the three models. On one hand, pull is robust with respect to all parameters that we consider. On the other hand, push may slow down significantly, even if the adversary may modify the degrees of the vertices by an arbitrarily small positive fraction only. Finally, push&pull is robust when no message transmission failures are considered, otherwise it may be slowed down. On the technical side, we develop two novel methods for the analysis of randomized rumour-spreading protocols. First, we exploit the notion of self-bounding functions to facilitate significantly the round-based analysis: we show that for any graph the variance of the growth of informed vertices is bounded by its expectation, so that concentration results follow immediately. Second, in order to control adversarial modifications of the graph we make use of a powerful tool from extremal graph theory, namely Szemerédi’s Regularity Lemma.

On the structure of Dense graphs with bounded clique number

We study structural properties of graphs with bounded clique number and high minimum degree. In particular, we show that there exists a function L = L(r,ɛ) such that every Kr-free graph G on n vertices with minimum degree at least ((2r–5)/(2r–3)+ɛ)n is homomorphic to a Kr-free graph on at most L vertices. It is known that the required minimum degree condition is approximately best possible for this result.For r = 3 this result was obtained by Łuczak (2006) and, more recently, Goddard and Lyle (2011) deduced the general case from Łuczak’s result. Łuczak’s proof was based on an application of Szemerédi’s regularity lemma and, as a consequence, it only gave rise to a tower-type bound on L(3, ɛ). The proof presented here replaces the application of the regularity lemma by a probabilistic argument, which yields a bound for L(r, ɛ) that is doubly exponential in poly(ɛ).

On the Size-Ramsey Number of Cycles

For given graphs G1,…, Gk, the size-Ramsey number $\hat R({G_1}, \ldots ,{G_k})$ is the smallest integer m for which there exists a graph H on m edges such that in every k-edge colouring of H with colours 1,…,k, H contains a monochromatic copy of Gi of colour i for some 1 ≤ i ≤ k. We denote $\hat R({G_1}, \ldots ,{G_k})$ by ${\hat R_k}(G)$ when G1 = ⋯ = Gk = G.Haxell, Kohayakawa and Łuczak showed that the size-Ramsey number of a cycle Cn is linear in n, ${\hat R_k}({C_n}) \le {c_k}n$ for some constant ck. Their proof, however, is based on Szemerédi’s regularity lemma so no specific constant ck is known.In this paper, we give various upper bounds for the size-Ramsey numbers of cycles. We provide an alternative proof of ${\hat R_k}({C_n}) \le {c_k}n$ , avoiding use of the regularity lemma, where ck is exponential and doubly exponential in k, when n is even and odd, respectively. In particular, we show that for sufficiently large n we have ${\hat R_2}({C_n}) \le {10^5} \times cn$ , where c = 6.5 if n is even and c = 1989 otherwise.

Hamilton Cycles in Sparse Robustly Expanding Digraphs

The notion of robust expansion has played a central role in the solution of several conjectures involving the packing of Hamilton cycles in graphs and directed graphs. These and other results usually rely on the fact that every robustly expanding (di)graph with suitably large minimum degree contains a Hamilton cycle. Previous proofs of this require Szemerédi's Regularity Lemma and so this fact can only be applied to dense, sufficiently large robust expanders. We give a proof that does not use the Regularity Lemma and, indeed, we can apply our result to sparser robustly expanding digraphs.

Tilings in Randomly Perturbed Dense Graphs

A perfect H-tiling in a graph G is a collection of vertex-disjoint copies of a graph H in G that together cover all the vertices in G. In this paper we investigate perfect H-tilings in a random graph model introduced by Bohman, Frieze and Martin [6] in which one starts with a dense graph and then adds m random edges to it. Specifically, for any fixed graph H, we determine the number of random edges required to add to an arbitrary graph of linear minimum degree in order to ensure the resulting graph contains a perfect H-tiling with high probability. Our proof utilizes Szemerédi's Regularity Lemma [29] as well as a special case of a result of Komlós [18] concerning almost perfect H-tilings in dense graphs.

Stability for Vertex Cycle Covers

In 1996 Kouider and Lonc proved the following natural generalization of Dirac's Theorem: for any integer $k\geq 2$, if $G$ is an $n$-vertex graph with minimum degree at least $n/k$, then there are $k-1$ cycles in $G$ that together cover all the vertices.This is tight in the sense that there are $n$-vertex graphs that have minimum degree $n/k-1$ and that do not contain $k-1$ cycles with this property. A concrete example is given by $I_{n,k} = K_n\setminus K_{(k-1)n/k+1}$ (an edge-maximal graph on $n$ vertices with an independent set of size $(k-1)n/k+1$). This graph has minimum degree $n/k-1$ and cannot be covered with fewer than $k$ cycles. More generally, given positive integers $k_1,\dotsc,k_r$ summing to $k$, the disjoint union $I_{k_1n/k,k_1}+ \dotsb + I_{k_rn/k,k_r}$ is an $n$-vertex graph with the same properties.In this paper, we show that there are no extremal examples that differ substantially from the ones given by this construction. More precisely, we obtain the following stability result: if a graph $G$ has $n$ vertices and minimum degree nearly $n/k$, then it either contains $k-1$ cycles covering all vertices, or else it must be close (in ‘edit distance') to a subgraph of $I_{k_1n/k,k_1}+ \dotsb + I_{k_rn/k,k_r}$, for some sequence $k_1,\dotsc,k_r$ of positive integers that sum to $k$.Our proof uses Szemerédi's Regularity Lemma and the related machinery.

On Regularity Lemmas and their Algorithmic Applications

Szemerédi's regularity lemma and its variants are some of the most powerful tools in combinatorics. In this paper, we establish several results around the regularity lemma. First, we prove that whether or not we include the condition that the desired vertex partition in the regularity lemma is equitable has a minimal effect on the number of parts of the partition. Second, we use an algorithmic version of the (weak) Frieze–Kannan regularity lemma to give a substantially faster deterministic approximation algorithm for counting subgraphs in a graph. Previously, only an exponential dependence for the running time on the error parameter was known, and we improve it to a polynomial dependence. Third, we revisit the problem of finding an algorithmic regularity lemma, giving approximation algorithms for several co-NP-complete problems. We show how to use the weak Frieze–Kannan regularity lemma to approximate the regularity of a pair of vertex subsets. We also show how to quickly find, for each ε′>ε, an ε′-regular partition withkparts if there exists an ε-regular partition withkparts. Finally, we give a simple proof of the permutation regularity lemma which improves the tower-type bound on the number of parts in the previous proofs to a single exponential bound.