$b$-Coloring Parameterized by Pathwidth is XNLP-complete

Abstract

We show that the $b$-Coloring problem is complete for the class XNLP when parameterized by the pathwidth of the input graph. Besides determining the precise parameterized complexity of this problem, this implies that b-Coloring parameterized by pathwidth is $W[t]$-hard for all $t$, and resolves the parameterized complexity of $b$-Coloring parameterized by treewidth.