For graph instances both for the min-max and the min-disagreement objectives, this work proves approximation guarantees that are substantially better than the bounds achievable for general graphs.
Abstract
Correlation clustering is a fundamental unsupervised learning problem. On complete graphs, both the min-disagreement and min-max objectives admit constant-factor approximations, yet on general (non-complete) graphs, the best guarantees blow up to $O(\log n)$ and $O(\sqrt{n})$. This gap between the two regimes motivates the following question: are there classes of incomplete graphs that circumvent the lower bounds on general graphs and admit approximation guarantees approaching those attainable on complete graphs? We study a natural class of graphs obtained by randomly subsampling a complete signed graph $G$, where each edge is independently deleted with probability $q$. For such graph instances both for the min-max and the min-disagreement objectives, we prove approximation guarantees (depending on $q$) that are substantially better than the bounds achievable for general graphs. We supplement our theoretical results with experiments that also suggest that the approximation ratios of our algorithm are close to those of the complete graph and better than the worst-case bounds for general (non-complete) graphs.
In the Correlation Clustering problem, we are given an undirected graph and are tasked with computing a clustering (partition of the nodes) that minimizes the number of violated pairs (edges across different clusters plus non-edges within clusters). In the constrained version of this problem, the goal is to compute a clustering that satisfies additional hard constraints mandating certain pairs to be in the same cluster and certain pairs to be in different clusters. In this work, we identify Constrained Correlation Clustering as a variant of Correlation Clustering for which optimal approximations might be within reach, and make progress towards this front. Constrained Correlation Clustering is APX-Hard, and the optimal approximation factor is known to lie in $(\frac{24}{23},3]$. We significantly tighten this gap, by showing that the optimal approximation factor lies in $[2,\frac{16}{7}-\gamma)$ for a small constant $\gamma>0$. Our lower bound of $2$ shows a separation between Correlation Clustering (which admits an $1.485+\epsilon$ approximation) and Constrained Correlation Clustering\footnote{The same hardness result was obtained independently by Cao and Xu~\cite{cao2026clusterdeletionhardapproximate}.}. Our upper bound of $\frac{16}{7}-\gamma$ uses the Sherali-Adams relaxation and goes beyond straightforward Triangle-Based analysis; more precisely, our algorithm belongs to a natural class of pivoting algorithms for which we prove that a straightforward Triangle-Based analysis cannot prove a better-than-$\frac{16}{7}$ approximation. Finally, as a byproduct of our techniques, we completely resolve the approximability of Cluster Deletion. Cluster Deletion is a well-studied special case of Constrained Correlation Clustering for which a $2$-approximation algorithm is known. We show that this is optimal, as our lower bound holds even for this special case.
Sina Azizeddin, Evangelos Kipouridis, Nithin M. Varma· 1 citation
This paper generalises the existing PTAS for complete graphs from a fixed to an arbitrary number of intervals and disprove an existing conjecture, which states that every instance of BIA admits a solution satisfying at least three quarters of all edges.
∗. PeterBlohm, ∗. FlorianChen, A. Gionis et al.· 0 citations
Consider the following variation on the Hierarchical Clustering problem: Usually, while building a hierarchical clustering, one recursively partitions the data until each cluster becomes a singleton. We relax the halting condition of the recursive process to stop whenever the remaining cluster is a graph belonging to a class $\mathcal{F}$. We call this problem Hierarchical $\mathcal{F}$-Clustering and we measure the quality of any solution using adapted Dasgupta's clustering objective. We study two natural choices of $\mathcal{F}$: trees and graphs of bounded diameter. We present the first polynomial time $\mathcal{O}(\log n\cdot\log\log n)$ and $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$-approximation algorithms for clustering into trees and bounded diameter graphs respectively. Our main technical contribution is a framework for approximating such problems based on linear programming. In fact, we characterize graphs classes $\mathcal{F}$ for which our approach can be applied and show that it includes both trees and bounded diameter graphs. However, our ideas are not limited to them and might be useful for other structures as well. Broadly speaking, our framework applies whenever the corresponding flat clustering problem, which we call $p_{\mathcal{F}}$-Partitioning, admits a natural ILP formulation together with a rounding procedure with provable approximation guarantees. Intuitively, given a set of vertices called terminals, the problem is to find an edge set whose removal results in satisfying certain vertex-dependent structural predicate for each terminal. We then use these ingredients to build clustering trees with the aforementioned approximation guarantees. To complement these results, we show that both Hierarchical Clustering into trees and into bounded diameter graphs cannot be approximated within any constant factor under the Small Set Expansion Hypothesis.
Given a graph $G$ labeled with positive distances on each edge, what is the fewest number of edge distances that must be modified for $G$ to become a metric? It is known that this metric repair problem is $\mathrm{NP}$-hard on general graphs, with prior work focusing on approximations and fixed-parameter tractability with respect to properties of the input distance function. In this paper, we ask what structural properties of the graph itself make metric repair tractable. On the positive side, we give pseudo-polynomial time algorithms for series-parallel graphs, and by generalization, graphs of bounded treewidth. An immediate consequence of this result is a new algorithm for the length-bounded multicut problem, with a parameterized runtime bound in terms of the treewidth of a modestly augmented graph. Surprisingly, pseudo-polynomial time turns out to be the best one can hope for: We complement our algorithm with a proof that metric repair is weakly $\mathrm{NP}$-hard even on graphs of pathwidth at most six. We also prove that planarity does not help either, as the problem remains strongly $\mathrm{NP}$-hard even on grid graphs.
Asaf Etgar, Anna C.Gilbert, Jamie Tucker-Foltz· 0 citations
We study the problem of releasing a synthetic graph that approximates the sizes of all cuts of an input graph under edge-level differential privacy. If one insists on purely additive error, the optimal worst-case error is $\widetilde\Theta(n^{3/2})$. If one allows a small multiplicative slack, an information-theoretic exponential-time mechanism achieves nearly linear additive error, but the best known polynomial-time algorithms have substantially larger error. We give a polynomial-time $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, for every $n$-vertex unweighted graph $G$, outputs a non-negative weighted synthetic graph $\widetilde G$ such that, with high probability, every cut $S\subseteq V(G)$ satisfies \[ |w_G(S)-w_{\widetilde G}(S)| \le \gamma w_G(S)+\widetilde O_{\varepsilon,\delta,\gamma}(n^{13/12+o(1)}). \] This improves the previous polynomial-time worst-case bound $\widetilde O(n^{5/4+o(1)})$ of Aamand et al. (ICML 2025) for mixed multiplicative/additive private cut approximation. The main technical ingredient is a new set of private spectral primitives for bounded-degree graphs, one of them gives spectral error $\widetilde O_{\delta}((nd)^{1/4}/\sqrt\varepsilon)$ in estimating the graph Laplacian for graphs of maximum degree $d$, being the first to beat the standard $\min\{2d,\widetilde O_{\delta}(\sqrt{n}/\varepsilon)\}$ baseline in the high-degree regime. We further develop a primitive with a sharper error dependence on $n$ and $d$ for the downstream cut approximation. Combined with a new edge-sensitive terminal cut oracle with additive error $\widetilde O(n+(n^2M)^{1/3})$ on graphs with $M$ edges, this yields the final worst-case $\widetilde O(n^{13/12+o(1)})$ private cut-release error.
Chenglin Fan, Jingcheng Liu, Pan Peng et al.· 0 citations
The RRS conjecture for constrained multi-relational graphons in the non-extremal regime is resolved, proving that entropy-maximizing solutions are step functions with finitely many blocks under the condition the subgraph density constraints are analytically independent and for almost all feasible combinations of sufficient statistics.