Reduction Techniques for Graph Isomorphism in the Context of Width Parameters

Abstract: We study the parameterized complexity of the graph isomorphism problem when parameterized by width parameters related to tree decompositions. We apply the following technique to obtain fixed-parameter tractability for such parameters. We first compute an isomorphism invariant set of potential bags for a decomposition and then apply a restricted version of the Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithm to solve isomorphism. With this we show fixed-parameter tractability for several parameters and provide a unified explanation for various isomorphism results concerned with parameters related to tree decompositions. As a possibly first step towards intractability results for parameterized graph isomorphism we develop an fpt Turing-reduction from strong tree width to the a priori unrelated parameter maximum degree.