Structure and algorithms for graphs excluding grids with small parity breaks as odd-minors

Abstract: We investigate a structural generalisation of treewidth we call $\mathcal{A}$-blind-treewidth where $\mathcal{A}$ denotes an annotated graph class. This width parameter is defined by evaluating only the size of those bags $B$ of tree-decompositions for a graph $G$ where ${(G,B) \notin \mathcal{A}}$. For the two cases where $\mathcal{A}$ is (i) the class $\mathcal{B}$ of all pairs ${(G,X)}$ such that no odd cycle in $G$ contains more than one vertex of ${X \subseteq V(G)}$ and (ii) the class $\mathcal{B}$ together with the class $\mathcal{P}$ of all pairs ${(G,X)}$ such that the "torso" of $X$ in $G$ is planar. For both classes, $\mathcal{B}$ and ${\mathcal{B} \cup \mathcal{P}}$, we obtain analogues of the Grid Theorem by Robertson and Seymour and FPT-algorithms that either compute decompositions of small width or correctly determine that the width of a given graph is large. Moreover, we present FPT-algorithms for Maximum Independent Set on graphs of bounded $\mathcal{B}$-blind-treewidth and Maximum Cut on graphs of bounded ${(\mathcal{B}\cup\mathcal{P})}$-blind-treewidth.