Structural Parameterizations for Induced and Acyclic Matching

We revisit the (structurally) parameterized complexity of Induced Matching and Acyclic Matching, two problems where we seek to find a maximum independent set of edges whose endpoints induce, respectively, a matching and a forest. Chaudhary and Zehavi~[WG '23] recently studied these problems parameterized by treewidth, denoted by $\mathrm{tw}$. We resolve several of the problems left open in their work and extend their results as follows: (i) for Acyclic Matching, Chaudhary and Zehavi gave an algorithm of running time $6^{\mathrm{tw}}n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$ and a lower bound of $(3-\varepsilon)^{\mathrm{tw}}n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$ (under the SETH); we close this gap by, on the one hand giving a more careful analysis of their algorithm showing that its complexity is actually $5^{\mathrm{tw}} n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$, and on the other giving a pw-SETH-based lower bound showing that this running time cannot be improved (even for pathwidth), (ii) for Induced Matching we show that their $3^{\mathrm{tw}} n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$ algorithm is optimal under the pw-SETH (in fact improving over this for pathwidth is \emph{equivalent} to falsifying the pw-SETH) by adapting a recent reduction for \textsc{Bounded Degree Vertex Deletion}, (iii) for both problems we give FPT algorithms with single-exponential dependence when parameterized by clique-width and in particular for \textsc{Induced Matching} our algorithm has running time $3^{\mathrm{cw}} n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$, which is optimal under the pw-SETH from our previous result.