Below are some of the significant papers on the project.
(1) Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh, Vaishali Surianarayanan: A Parameterized Approximation Scheme for Min $k$-Cut. FOCS 2020: 798-809
(2) Fedor V. Fomin, Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh, Meirav Zehavi:
Approximation Schemes via Width/Weight Trade-offs on Minor-free Graphs. SODA 2020: 2299-2318
(3) Daniel Lokshtanov, Pranabendu Misra, Michal Pilipczuk, Saket Saurabh, Meirav Zehavi:
An exponential time parameterized algorithm for planar disjoint paths. STOC 2020: 1307-1316
(4) Daniel Lokshtanov, Pranabendu Misra, M. S. Ramanujan, Saket Saurabh, Meirav Zehavi:
FPT-approximation for FPT Problems. SODA 2021: 199-218
(5) Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh, Meirav Zehavi:
Efficient Computation of Representative Weight Functions with Applications to Parameterized Counting (Extended Version). SODA 2021: 179-198
(6) Neeraj Kumar, Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh, Subhash Suri:
A Constant Factor Approximation for Navigating Through Connected Obstacles in the Plane. SODA 2021: 822-839
All of the above are significant achievements and advances our research field significantly beyond the state of the art. A Parameterized Approximation Scheme for Min k-Cut was completely unplanned.
While developing a sparsification tool for our project, we realized that we could apply it to this problem. We belive that by the end of the project we will be able to achieve significant portion of stated goals and would have made significant contribution to the world of compression.