Oriented, 2-edge-colored, and 2-vertex-colored homomorphisms

We show that the 2-edge-colored chromatic number of a class of simple graphs is bounded if and only if the acyclic chromatic number is bounded for this class. Recently, the CSP dichotomy conjecture has been reduced to the case of 2-edge-colored homomorphism and to the case of 2-vertex-colored homomorphism. Both reductions are rather long and follow the reduction to the case of oriented homomorphism in "Graphs and homomorphisms" by Hell and Nešetřil. We give an alternate proof of the case of 2-vertex-colored homomorphism via a simple reduction from the case of 2-edge-colored homomorphism. Finally, we prove that deciding if the 2-edge-colored chromatic number of a 2-edge-colored graph is at most 4 is NP-complete, even if restricted to 2-connected subcubic bipartite planar graphs with arbitrarily large girth.