A General Reduction from Near-Additive Emulators to Near-Exact Hopsets

Abstract

Graph emulators and hopsets are two fundamental concepts for distance approximation. When the multiplicative stretch is $1+ε$ for arbitrarily small $ε>0$, these structures are known as near-additive emulators and near-exact hopsets, respectively. Prior work showed that there is a remarkable similarity between the constructions and guarantees of these two objects. In their survey on this topic, Elkin and Neiman [Bull. EATCS 130, 2020] explicitly asked whether one can obtain a general reduction between near-additive emulators and near-exact hopsets. Following that, Kogan and Parter [FOCS, 2022] provided a general reduction from hopsets to emulators and spanners. In this paper, we address the reverse direction and show that any construction for a near-additive emulator for undirected unweighted graphs can be leveraged as a black box to construct a hopset for an undirected weighted graph with comparable size, stretch, and a hopbound comparable to the emulator&#39;s additive stretch. Specifically, we show that any algorithm that constructs a $(1+ε&#39;,β)$-emulator, with $0 \le ε&#39; \le 1$ and $β\ge 1$, of size $S_{\mathcal{A}}(n, ε&#39;,β)$, can be used to obtain a $(1+ε, O(\frac{β^2}{ε^2} \ln(\frac{n}ε)))$-hopset of size $O((S_{\mathcal{A}}(n+m\fracβ{ε^2}, \fracε{294},β) \frac{1}ε + n)\ln(\frac{n}ε))$, for any $0 < ε\le 1$. Therefore, our reduction answers the question of Elkin and Neiman [Bull. EATCS 130, 2020] for sparse graphs and further advances the understanding of the formal connection between these two structures. Designing a reduction resulting in a hopset size that does not depend on $m$ remains an intriguing open question.