Induced Disjoint Paths and Connected Subgraphs for $H$-Free Graphs

Paths $P_1,\ldots, P_k$ in a graph $G=(V,E)$ are mutually induced if any two distinct $P_i$ and $P_j$ have neither common vertices nor adjacent vertices. The Induced Disjoint Paths problem is to decide if a graph $G$ with $k$ pairs of specified vertices $(s_i,t_i)$ contains $k$ mutually induced paths $P_i$ such that each $P_i$ starts from $s_i$ and ends at $t_i$. This is a classical graph problem that is NP-complete even for $k=2$. We introduce a natural generalization, Induced Disjoint Connected Subgraphs: instead of connecting pairs of terminals, we must connect sets of terminals. We give almost-complete dichotomies of the computational complexity of both problems for $H$-free graphs, that is, graphs that do not contain some fixed graph $H$ as an induced subgraph. We also classify the complexity of the second problem (subject to one missing case) if the number of terminal sets is fixed, that is, not part of the input.