(Treewidth, Clique)-Boundedness and Poly-logarithmic Tree-Independence

Abstract

An independent set in a graph $G$ is a set of pairwise non-adjacent vertices. A tree decomposition of $G$ is a pair $(T, \chi)$ where $T$ is a tree and $\chi : V(T) \rightarrow 2^{V(G)}$ is a function satisfying the following two axioms: for every edge $uv \in V(G)$ there is a $x \in V(T)$ such that $\{u,v\} \subseteq \chi(x)$, and for every vertex $u \in V(G)$ the set $\{x \in V(T) ~:~ u \in \chi(X)\}$ induces a non-empty and connected subtree of $T$. The sets $\chi(x)$ for $x \in V(T)$ are called the bags of the tree decomposition. The tree-independence number of $G$ is the minimum taken over all tree decompositions of $G$ of the maximum size of an independent set of the graph induced by a bag of the tree decomposition. The study of graph classes with bounded tree-independence number has attracted much attention in recent years, in part due its improtant algorithmic implications. A conjecture of Dallard, Milani\v{c} and \v{S}torgel, connecting tree-independence number to the classical notion of treewidth, was one of the motivating problems in the area. This conjecture was recently disproved, but here we prove a slight variant of it, that retains much of the algorithmic significance. As part of the proof we introduce the notion of independence-containers, which can be viewed as a generalization of the set of all maximal cliques of a graph, and is of independent interest.