Hardness of Dynamic Tree Edit Distance and Friends

November 13, 2025 Β· Declared Dead Β· πŸ› Information Technology Convergence and Services

πŸ‘» CAUSE OF DEATH: Ghosted
No code link whatsoever

"No code URL or promise found in abstract"

Evidence collected by the PWNC Scanner

Authors Bingbing Hu, Jakob Nogler, Barna Saha arXiv ID 2511.09842 Category cs.DS: Data Structures & Algorithms Citations 0 Venue Information Technology Convergence and Services Last Checked 4 months ago
Abstract
String Edit Distance is a more-than-classical problem whose behavior in the dynamic setting, where the strings are updated over time, is well studied. A single-character substitution, insertion, or deletion can be processed in time $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n w)$ when operation costs are positive integers bounded by $w$ [Charalampopoulos, Kociumaka, Mozes, CPM 2020][Gorbachev, Kociumaka, STOC 2025]. If the weights are further uniform (insertions and deletions have equal cost), also an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n \sqrt{n})$-update time algorithm exists [Charalampopoulos, Kociumaka, Mozes, CPM 2020]. This is a substantial improvement over the static $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ algorithm when $w \ll n$ or when we are dealing with uniform weights. In contrast, for inherently related problems such as Tree Edit Distance, Dyck Edit Distance, and RNA Folding, it has remained unknown whether it is possible to devise dynamic algorithms with an advantage over the static algorithm. In this paper, we resolve this question by showing that (weighted) Tree Edit Distance, Dyck Edit Distance, and RNA Folding admit no dynamic speedup: under well-known fine-grained assumptions we show that the best possible algorithm recomputes the solution from scratch after each update. Furthermore, we prove a quadratic per-update lower bound for unweighted Tree Edit Distance under the $k$-Clique Conjecture. This provides the first separation between dynamic unweighted String Edit Distance and unweighted Tree Edit Distance, problems whose relative difficulty in the static setting is still open.
Community shame:
Not yet rated
Community Contributions

Found the code? Know the venue? Think something is wrong? Let us know!

πŸ“œ Similar Papers

In the same crypt β€” Data Structures & Algorithms

Died the same way β€” πŸ‘» Ghosted