Cutting a tree with subgraph complementation is hard, except for some small trees

Abstract

For a graph property $\Pi$, Subgraph Complementation to $\Pi$ is the problem to find whether there is a subset $S$ of vertices of the input graph $G$ such that modifying $G$ by complementing the subgraph induced by $S$ results in a graph satisfying the property $\Pi$. We prove that the problem of Subgraph Complementation to $T$-free graphs is NP-Complete, for $T$ being a tree, except for 41 trees of at most 13 vertices (a graph is $T$-free if it does not contain any induced copies of $T$). This result, along with the four known polynomial-time solvable cases (when $T$ is a path on at most four vertices), leaves behind 37 open cases. Further, we prove that these hard problems do not admit any subexponential-time algorithms, assuming the Exponential-Time Hypothesis. As an additional result, we obtain that Subgraph Complementation to paw-free graphs can be solved in polynomial-time.