Deterministic Fully Dynamic Approximate Vertex Cover and Fractional Matching in O(1) Amortized Update Time

We consider the problems of maintaining an approximate maximum matching and an approximate minimum vertex cover in a dynamic graph undergoing a sequence of edge insertions/deletions. Starting with the seminal work of Onak and Rubinfeld [STOC 2010], this problem has received significant attention in recent years. Very recently, extending the framework of Baswana, Gupta and Sen [FOCS 2011], Solomon [FOCS 2016] gave a randomized dynamic algorithm for this problem that has an approximation ratio of $2$ and an amortised update time of $O(1)$ with high probability. This algorithm requires the assumption of an {\em oblivious adversary}, meaning that the future sequence of edge insertions/deletions in the graph cannot depend in any way on the algorithm's past output. A natural way to remove the assumption on oblivious adversary is to give a deterministic dynamic algorithm for the same problem in $O(1)$ update time. In this paper, we resolve this question. We present a new {\em deterministic} fully dynamic algorithm that maintains a $O(1)$-approximate minimum vertex cover and maximum fractional matching, with an amortised update time of $O(1)$. Previously, the best deterministic algorithm for this problem was due to Bhattacharya, Henzinger and Italiano [SODA 2015]; it had an approximation ratio of $(2+\epsilon)$ and an amortised update time of $O(\log n/\epsilon^2)$. Our results also extend to a fully dynamic $O(f^3)$-approximate algorithm with $O(f^2)$ amortized update time for the hypergraph vertex cover and fractional hypergraph matching problems, where every hyperedge has at most $f$ vertices.