Single-Exponential FPT Algorithms for Enumerating Secluded $\mathcal{F}$-Free Subgraphs and Deleting to Scattered Graph Classes

The celebrated notion of important separators bounds the number of small $(S,T)$-separators in a graph which are 'farthest from $S$' in a technical sense. In this paper, we introduce a generalization of this powerful algorithmic primitive that is phrased in terms of $k$-secluded vertex sets: sets with an open neighborhood of size at most $k$. In this terminology, the bound on important separators says that there are at most $4^k$ maximal $k$-secluded connected vertex sets $C$ containing $S$ but disjoint from $T$. We generalize this statement significantly: even when we demand that $G[C]$ avoids a finite set $\mathcal{F}$ of forbidden induced subgraphs, the number of such maximal subgraphs is $2^{O(k)}$ and they can be enumerated efficiently. This allows us to make significant improvements for two problems from the literature. Our first application concerns the 'Connected $k$-Secluded $\mathcal{F}$-free subgraph' problem, where $\mathcal{F}$ is a finite set of forbidden induced subgraphs. Given a graph in which each vertex has a positive integer weight, the problem asks to find a maximum-weight connected $k$-secluded vertex set $C \subseteq V(G)$ such that $G[C]$ does not contain an induced subgraph isomorphic to any $F \in \mathcal{F}$. The parameterization by $k$ is known to be solvable in triple-exponential time via the technique of recursive understanding, which we improve to single-exponential. Our second application concerns the deletion problem to scattered graph classes. Here, the task is to find a vertex set of size at most $k$ whose removal yields a graph whose each connected component belongs to one of the prescribed graph classes $\Pi_1, \ldots, \Pi_d$. We obtain a single-exponential algorithm whenever each class $\Pi_i$ is characterized by a finite number of forbidden induced subgraphs. This generalizes and improves upon earlier results in the literature.