Related papers: Extensions of Karger's Algorithm: Why They Fail in…
A min-cut that seperates vertices s and t in a network is an edge set of minimum weight whose removal will disconnect s and t. This problem is the dual of the well known s-t max-flow problem. Several algorithms for the min-cut problem are…
Global minimum cut is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem with wide-ranging applications. Often in practice, these problems are solved repeatedly on families of similar or related instances. However, the de facto algorithmic…
We consider the minimum cut problem in undirected, weighted graphs. We give a simple algorithm to find a minimum cut that $2$-respects (cuts two edges of) a spanning tree $T$ of a graph $G$. This procedure can be used in place of the…
Consider the following 2-respecting min-cut problem. Given a weighted graph $G$ and its spanning tree $T$, find the minimum cut among the cuts that contain at most two edges in $T$. This problem is an important subroutine in Karger's…
The minimum cut problem for an undirected edge-weighted graph asks us to divide its set of nodes into two blocks while minimizing the weight sum of the cut edges. Here, we introduce a linear-time algorithm to compute near-minimum cuts. Our…
In this note, we revisit the recursive random contraction algorithm of Karger and Stein for finding a minimum cut in a graph. Our revisit is occasioned by a paper of Fox, Panigrahi, and Zhang which gives an extension of the Karger-Stein…
Karger (SIAM Journal on Computing, 1999) developed the first fully-polynomial approximation scheme to estimate the probability that a graph $G$ becomes disconnected, given that its edges are removed independently with probability $p$. This…
Given an edge-weighted graph, how many minimum $k$-cuts can it have? This is a fundamental question in the intersection of algorithms, extremal combinatorics, and graph theory. It is particularly interesting in that the best known bounds…
We provide a simple new randomized contraction approach to the global minimum cut problem for simple undirected graphs. The contractions exploit 2-out edge sampling from each vertex rather than the standard uniform edge sampling. We…
The sparsest cut problem consists of identifying a small set of edges that breaks the graph into balanced sets of vertices. The normalized cut problem balances the total degree, instead of the size, of the resulting sets. Applications of…
A common way of partitioning graphs is through minimum cuts. One drawback of classical minimum cut methods is that they tend to produce small groups, which is why more balanced variants such as normalized and ratio cuts have seen more…
We consider the (exact, minimum) $k$-cut problem: given a graph and an integer $k$, delete a minimum-weight set of edges so that the remaining graph has at least $k$ connected components. This problem is a natural generalization of the…
We present a deterministic (global) mincut algorithm for weighted, undirected graphs that runs in $m^{1+o(1)}$ time, answering an open question of Karger from the 1990s. To obtain our result, we de-randomize the construction of the…
Given an undirected edge-weighted graph $G=(V,E)$ with $m$ edges and $n$ vertices, the minimum cut problem asks to find a subset of vertices $S$ such that the total weight of all edges between $S$ and $V \setminus S$ is minimized. Karger's…
We significantly improve known time bounds for solving the minimum cut problem on undirected graphs. We use a ``semi-duality'' between minimum cuts and maximum spanning tree packings combined with our previously developed random sampling…
We give a new $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation for sparsest cut problem on graphs where small sets expand significantly more than the sparsest cut (sets of size $n/r$ expand by a factor $\sqrt{\log n\log r}$ bigger, for some small $r$; this…
Graphs are a natural representation of data from various contexts, such as social connections, the web, road networks, and many more. In the last decades, many of these networks have become enormous, requiring efficient algorithms to cut…
In the $k$-cut problem, we want to find the lowest-weight set of edges whose deletion breaks a given (multi)graph into $k$ connected components. Algorithms of Karger \& Stein can solve this in roughly $O(n^{2k})$ time. On the other hand,…
In 1996, Karger [Kar96] gave a startling randomized algorithm that finds a minimum-cut in a (weighted) graph in time $O(m\log^3n)$ which he termed near-linear time meaning linear (in the size of the input) times a polylogarthmic factor. In…
The minimum $s$-$t$ cut problem in graphs is one of the most fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization, and graph cuts underlie algorithms throughout discrete mathematics, theoretical computer science, operations research, and data…