Dynamic Treewidth in Logarithmic Time

Abstract

We present a dynamic data structure that maintains a tree decomposition of width at most $9k+8$ of a dynamic graph with treewidth at most $k$, which is updated by edge insertions and deletions. The amortized update time of our data structure is $2^{O(k)} \log n$, where $n$ is the number of vertices. The data structure also supports maintaining any ``dynamic programming scheme'' on the tree decomposition, providing, for example, a dynamic version of Courcelle's theorem with $O_{k}(\log n)$ amortized update time; the $O_{k}(\cdot)$ notation hides factors that depend on $k$. This improves upon a result of Korhonen, Majewski, Nadara, Pilipczuk, and Soko{\l}owski [FOCS 2023], who gave a similar data structure but with amortized update time $2^{k^{O(1)}} n^{o(1)}$. Furthermore, our data structure is arguably simpler. Our main novel idea is to maintain a tree decomposition that is ``downwards well-linked'', which allows us to implement local rotations and analysis similar to those for splay trees.