Hierarchical threshold structure in Max-Cut with geometric edge weights
Abstract
We study a family of weighted Max-Cut instances on the complete graph in which edge weights decrease geometrically in lexicographic order: the -th edge has weight where . For , the lexicographically first cut is optimal; for , all edges have equal weight and the balanced partition wins. In this paper we study the intermediate regime . The geometric weighting makes early edges dominant and singles out the -isolated cuts as natural candidates for optimality. For each and , we define threshold polynomials whose unique roots determine when and exchange dominance. We prove that, for fixed , these thresholds are strictly decreasing in and that as . As our main result, we show that for the cut achieves maximum weight among all isolated cuts, yielding a sharp phase diagram for the isolated-cut family. We conjecture that isolated cuts are globally optimal among all cuts when ; all counterexamples for small are characterized completely, and extensive computations for support the conjecture.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.08876,
title = {Hierarchical threshold structure in Max-Cut with geometric edge weights},
author = {Nevena Marić},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.08876},
year = {2026}
}