4,699 research outputs found
Max flow vitality in general and -planar graphs
The \emph{vitality} of an arc/node of a graph with respect to the maximum
flow between two fixed nodes and is defined as the reduction of the
maximum flow caused by the removal of that arc/node. In this paper we address
the issue of determining the vitality of arcs and/or nodes for the maximum flow
problem. We show how to compute the vitality of all arcs in a general
undirected graph by solving only max flow instances and, In
-planar graphs (directed or undirected) we show how to compute the vitality
of all arcs and all nodes in worst-case time. Moreover, after
determining the vitality of arcs and/or nodes, and given a planar embedding of
the graph, we can determine the vitality of a `contiguous' set of arcs/nodes in
time proportional to the size of the set.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure
Tight Bounds for Gomory-Hu-like Cut Counting
By a classical result of Gomory and Hu (1961), in every edge-weighted graph
, the minimum -cut values, when ranging over all ,
take at most distinct values. That is, these instances
exhibit redundancy factor . They further showed how to construct
from a tree that stores all minimum -cut values. Motivated
by this result, we obtain tight bounds for the redundancy factor of several
generalizations of the minimum -cut problem.
1. Group-Cut: Consider the minimum -cut, ranging over all subsets
of given sizes and . The redundancy
factor is .
2. Multiway-Cut: Consider the minimum cut separating every two vertices of
, ranging over all subsets of a given size . The
redundancy factor is .
3. Multicut: Consider the minimum cut separating every demand-pair in
, ranging over collections of demand pairs. The
redundancy factor is . This result is a bit surprising, as
the redundancy factor is much larger than in the first two problems.
A natural application of these bounds is to construct small data structures
that stores all relevant cut values, like the Gomory-Hu tree. We initiate this
direction by giving some upper and lower bounds.Comment: This version contains additional references to previous work (which
have some overlap with our results), see Bibliographic Update 1.
Posimodular Function Optimization
Given a posimodular function on a finite set , we
consider the problem of finding a nonempty subset of that minimizes
. Posimodular functions often arise in combinatorial optimization such as
undirected cut functions. In this paper, we show that any algorithm for the
problem requires oracle calls to , where
. It contrasts to the fact that the submodular function minimization,
which is another generalization of cut functions, is polynomially solvable.
When the range of a given posimodular function is restricted to be
for some nonnegative integer , we show that
oracle calls are necessary, while we propose an
-time algorithm for the problem. Here, denotes the
time needed to evaluate the function value for a given .
We also consider the problem of maximizing a given posimodular function. We
show that oracle calls are necessary for solving the problem,
and that the problem has time complexity when
is the range of for some constant .Comment: 18 page
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