{"ID":2851065,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20341","arxiv_id":"2510.20341","title":"Separations between Oblivious and Adaptive Adversaries for Natural Dynamic Graph Problems","abstract":"We establish the first update-time separation between dynamic algorithms against oblivious adversaries and those against adaptive adversaries in natural dynamic graph problems, based on popular fine-grained complexity hypotheses. Specifically, under the combinatorial BMM hypothesis, we show that every combinatorial algorithm against an adaptive adversary for the incremental maximal independent set problem requires $n^{1-o(1)}$ amortized update time. Furthermore, assuming either the 3SUM or APSP hypotheses, every algorithm for the decremental maximal clique problem needs $Δ/n^{o(1)}$ amortized update time when the initial maximum degree is $Δ\\le \\sqrt{n}$. These lower bounds are matched by existing algorithms against adaptive adversaries. In contrast, both problems admit algorithms against oblivious adversaries that achieve $\\operatorname{polylog}(n)$ amortized update time [Behnezhad, Derakhshan, Hajiaghayi, Stein, Sudan; FOCS '19] [Chechik, Zhang; FOCS '19]. Therefore, our separations are exponential. Previously known separations for dynamic algorithms were either engineered for contrived problems and relied on strong cryptographic assumptions [Beimel, Kaplan, Mansour, Nissim, Saranurak, Stemmer; STOC '22], or worked for problems whose inputs are not explicitly given but are accessed through oracle calls [Bateni, Esfandiari, Fichtenberger, Henzinger, Jayaram, Mirrokni, Wiese; SODA '23]. As a byproduct, we also provide a separation between incremental and decremental algorithms for the triangle detection problem: we show a decremental algorithm with $\\tilde{O}(n^ω)$ total update time, while every incremental algorithm requires $n^{3-o(1)}$ total update time, assuming the OMv hypothesis. To our knowledge this is the first separation of this kind.","short_abstract":"We establish the first update-time separation between dynamic algorithms against oblivious adversaries and those against adaptive adversaries in natural dynamic graph problems, based on popular fine-grained complexity hypotheses. Specifically, under the combinatorial BMM hypothesis, we show that every combinatorial alg...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20341","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20341v1","authors":"[\"Aaron Bernstein\",\"Sayan Bhattacharya\",\"Nick Fischer\",\"Peter Kiss\",\"Thatchaphol Saranurak\"]","published":"2025-10-23T08:40:19Z","proceeding":"cs.DS","tasks":"[\"cs.DS\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}