Not All Degree Constraints Are Created Equal when Computing Spanning Trees

Abstract

We study the computation of minimum spanning trees subject to local degree constraints. Recent work (ICALP 2026) established that three natural formalizations of this problem share the exact same parameterized complexity under standard structural graph parameters, including treewidth, pathwidth and clique-width. This applies to the cases where every vertex has a single target degree (Specified Degree MST), or a degree upper bound (Bounded Degree MST), or is equipped with a set of admissible degrees (Set of Degrees MST). In this paper, we investigate these problems under more restrictive parameterizations and reveal that their complexity landscapes fundamentally diverge on bounded-treedepth graphs. Specifically, we prove that the former two problems are fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the treedepth of the input graph. In sharp contrast, we show that Set of Degrees MST remains W[1]-hard parameterized by treedepth, even when combined with the feedback vertex number (i.e., deletion distance to treewidth $1$). Finally, we show that this divergence seems to be specific to treedepth: we exclude an analogous W[1]-hardness result for Set of Degrees MST w.r.t. the vertex cover number and also rule out fixed-parameter algorithms for the former two problems w.r.t. deletion distance to constant pathwidth.

To appear at IPEC 2026. This is the original submitted version - reviewer comments will be incorporated in a later version