Adjoint functors and tree duality

Abstract

A family T of digraphs is a complete set of obstructions for a digraph H if for an arbitrary digraph G the existence of a homomorphism from G to H is equivalent to the non-existence of a homomorphism from any member of T to G. A digraph H is said to have tree duality if there exists a complete set of obstructions T consisting of orientations of trees. We show that if H has tree duality, then its arc graph δH also has tree duality, and we derive a family of tree obstructions for δH from the obstructions for H. Furthermore we generalise our result to right adjoint functors on categories of relational structures. We show that these functors always preserve tree duality, as well as polynomial CSPs and the existence of near-unanimity functions. © 2009 Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DMTCS), Nancy, France.