Improved guarantees for vertex sparsification in planar graphs

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⊂𝑉 with |𝐾|=𝑘, a (vertex) reachability sparsifier of 𝐺 is a digraph 𝐻=(𝑉𝐻,𝐸𝐻), 𝐾⊂𝑉𝐻 that preserves all reachability information among terminal pairs. Let |𝑉𝐻| denote the size of 𝐻. 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 an RPM 𝐻 of size 𝑂(𝑘3), and if 𝐺 is planar, then the size of 𝐻 improves to 𝑂(𝑘2log𝑘). We complement our upper bound by showing that there exists an infinite family of grids such that any RPM must have Ω(𝑘2) 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⊂𝑉𝐻 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(𝑘2) that are also planar. Our result extends to flow and distance sparsifiers. It improves the previous best-known bound of 𝑂(𝑘222𝑘) for cut and flow sparsifiers by an exponential factor and matches an Ω(𝑘2) lower-bound for this class of graphs.