This work relaxes the min cut problem into a double-bounded constraint and, for the first time, treats the min cut problem as a double-bounded nonlinear optimal transport problem and develops a method for solving double bounded nonlinear optimal transport based on the Frank-Wolfe method.
Abstract
Min cut is an important graph partitioning method. However, current solutions to the min cut problem suffer from slow speeds, difficulty in solving, and often converge to simple solutions. To address these issues, we relax the min cut problem into a double-bounded constraint and, for the first time, treat the min cut problem as a double-bounded nonlinear optimal transport problem. Additionally, we develop a method for solving double bounded nonlinear optimal transport based on the Frank-Wolfe method (abbreviated as DNF). We prove that for convex problems satisfying Lipschitz smoothness, the DNF method can achieve a convergence rate of \(\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{t})\). We apply DNF to size-constrained min-cut clustering and evaluate it on eight benchmark datasets. DNF achieves competitive clustering performance and matches or outperforms the compared baselines on several datasets and metrics.
We give a fast algorithm for solving min-cost $k$-commodity flow. The basic idea is to construct an auxiliary linear program that has low rank and whose minimum value is at most $1/k$ times the minimum value of the original problem (thus, solving this auxiliary linear program will make at least $1/k$ fraction of progre...
Chen-Xin Dai, Alicia Stepin, Colin Tang· 0 citations
This work presents the first publicly available implementation of IPC for conductance*, together with an extensive experimental study comparing its performance against state-of-the-art techniques, including several spectral method implementations, several flow-based methods, and METIS.
D. Hochbaum, Ayleen Irribarra-Cortés, Roberto Asín-Achá· Optimization and Engineering· 1 citation
A new structural analysis of the Bamas--Drygala--Svensson LP-guided DFS algorithm is given, which combines an exact primal--dual identity for the residual uplink problem with a rank bound that measures fractional support relative to the unit-valued skeleton.
It is proved that neither the SLR itself nor its associated upper bound admits a uniform improvement by a polynomial-time algorithm with access to a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) oracle, which rules out uniform improvements by iterative MILP-based approaches, including cutting-plane-based and decomposition al...
The Dual-GNN Multilevel Coarsening framework uses learning to guide multilevel graph coarsening while retaining combinatorial search for final decision making and achieves the best mean solution quality among all evaluated methods.
It is demonstrated that while algorithms do eventually converge to theoretically predicted bounds, this convergence can be remarkably slow; in the intermediate regime where instances are already highly constrained, local algorithms achieve solutions substantially better than their predicted performance in the high-cons...
A. Umar, Jean Barbier, Matthieu Jonckheere et al.· 0 citations
Related blog posts
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduOct 23, 2026
Assistant Professor Benjamin Lindquist studies how engineers deliberately injected randomness into early AI, giving rise to deep-learning models that sometimes hallucinate.