Min (A)cyclic Feedback Vertex Sets and Min Ones Monotone 3-SAT

Abstract: In directed graphs, we investigate the problems of finding: 1) a minimum feedback vertex set (also called the Feedback Vertex Set problem, or MFVS), 2) a feedback vertex set inducing an acyclic graph (also called the Vertex 2-Coloring without Monochromatic Cycles problem, or Acyclic FVS) and 3) a minimum feedback vertex set inducing an acyclic graph (Acyclic MFVS). We show that these problems are strongly related to (variants of) Monotone 3-SAT and Monotone NAE 3-SAT, where monotone means that all literals are in positive form. As a consequence, we deduce several NP-completeness results on restricted versions of these problems. In particular, we define the 2-Choice version of an optimization problem to be its restriction where the optimum value is known to be either D or D+1 for some integer D, and the problem is reduced to decide which of D or D+1 is the optimum value. We show that the 2-Choice versions of MFVS, Acyclic MFVS, Min Ones Monotone 3-SAT and Min Ones Monotone NAE 3-SAT are NP-complete. The two latter problems are the variants of Monotone 3-SAT and respectively Monotone NAE 3-SAT requiring that the truth assignment minimize the number of variables set to true. Finally, we propose two classes of directed graphs for which Acyclic FVS is polynomially solvable, namely flow reducible graphs (for which MFVS is already known to be polynomially solvable) and C1P-digraphs (defined by an adjacency matrix with the Consecutive Ones Property).