We develop a new algorithmic framework for designing approximation algorithms for cut-based optimization problems on capacitated undirected graphs that undergo edge insertions and deletions. Specifically, our framework dynamically maintains a variant of the hierarchical \(j\)-tree decomposition of [Madry FOCS’10], achieving a poly-logarithmic approximation factor to the graph’s cut structure and supporting edge updates in \(O(n^{\varepsilon})\) amortized update time, for any arbitrarily small constant \(\varepsilon \in (0,1)\).

Tree embedding has been a fundamental method in algorithm design with wide applications. We focus on the efficiency of building tree embedding in various computational settings under high-dimensional Euclidean \(\mathbb{R}^d\). We devise a new tree embedding construction framework that operates on an arbitrary metric decomposition with bounded diameter, offering a tradeoff between distortion and the locality of its algorithmic steps. This framework works for general metric spaces and may be of independent interest beyond the Euclidean setting. Using this framework, we obtain a dynamic algorithm that maintains an \(O_{\epsilon}(\log n)\)-distortion tree embedding with update time \(\tilde{O}(n^{\epsilon} + d)\) subject to point insertions/deletions, and a massively parallel algorithm that achieves \(O_{\epsilon}(\log n)\)-distortion in \(O(1)\) rounds and total space \(\tilde{O}(n^{1+\epsilon})\) (for constant \(\epsilon \in (0,1)\)). These new tree embedding results allow for a wide range of applications. Notably, under a similar performance guarantee as in our tree embedding algorithms, i.e., \(\tilde{O}(n^{\epsilon} + d)\) update time and \(O(1)\) rounds, we obtain \(O_{\epsilon}(\log n)\)-approximate dynamic and MPC algorithms for \(k\)-median and earth-mover distance in \(\mathbb{R}^d\).

There has been a surge of interest in spectral hypergraph sparsification, a natural generalization of spectral sparsification for graphs. In this paper, we present a simple fully dynamic algorithm for maintaining spectral hypergraph sparsifiers of directed hypergraphs. Our algorithm achieves a near-optimal size of O(n² / ε ² log ⁷ m) and amortized update time of O(r² log ³ m), where n is the number of vertices, and m and r respectively upper bound the number of hyperedges and the rank of the hypergraph at any time. We also extend our approach to the parallel batch-dynamic setting, where a batch of any k hyperedge insertions or deletions can be processed with O(kr² log ³ m) amortized work and O(log ² m) depth. This constitutes the first spectral-based sparsification algorithm in this setting.

We give an algorithm that, with high probability, maintains a \((1-\varepsilon)\) -approximate \(s\text{-}t\) maximum flow in undirected, uncapacitated \( n \) -vertex graphs undergoing \( m \) edge insertions in \(\tilde{O}(m+nF^{*}/\varepsilon)\) total update time, where \(F^{*}\) is the maximum flow on the final graph. This is the first algorithm to achieve polylogarithmic amortized update time for dense graphs ( \(m=\Omega(n^{2})\) ), and more generally, for graphs where \(F^{*}=\tilde{O}(m/n)\) . At the heart of our incremental algorithm is the residual graph sparsification technique of Karger and Levine [STOC ’02, SICOMP ’15], originally designed for computing exact maximum flows in the static setting. Our main contributions are (i) showing how to maintain such sparsifiers for approximate maximum flows in the incremental setting and (ii) generalizing the cut sparsification framework of Fung et al. [STOC ’11, SICOMP ’19] from undirected graphs to balanced directed graphs.

We give an algorithm that, with high probability, maintains a (1-ε)-approximate s-t maximum flow in undirected, uncapacitated n-vertex graphs undergoing m edge insertions in Õ(m+ n F^*/ε) total update time, where F^{*} is the maximum flow on the final graph. This is the first algorithm to achieve polylogarithmic amortized update time for dense graphs (m = Ω(n²)), and more generally, for graphs where F^* = Õ(m/n). At the heart of our incremental algorithm is the residual graph sparsification technique of Karger and Levine [SICOMP '15], originally designed for computing exact maximum flows in the static setting. Our main contributions are (i) showing how to maintain such sparsifiers for approximate maximum flows in the incremental setting and (ii) generalizing the cut sparsification framework of Fung et al. [SICOMP '19] from undirected graphs to balanced directed graphs.

Given a directed graph G, a transitive reduction G^t of G (first studied by Aho, Garey, Ullman [SICOMP `72]) is a minimal subgraph of G that preserves the reachability relation between every two vertices in G. In this paper, we study the computational complexity of transitive reduction in the dynamic setting. We obtain the first fully dynamic algorithms for maintaining a transitive reduction of a general directed graph undergoing updates such as edge insertions or deletions. Our first algorithm achieves O(m+n log n) amortized update time, which is near-optimal for sparse directed graphs, and can even support extended update operations such as inserting a set of edges all incident to the same vertex, or deleting an arbitrary set of edges. Our second algorithm relies on fast matrix multiplication and achieves O(m+ n^{1.585}) worst-case update time.

We consider the Euclidean bi-chromatic matching problem in the dynamic setting, where the goal is to efficiently process point insertions and deletions while maintaining a high-quality solution. Computing the minimum cost bi-chromatic matching is one of the core problems in geometric optimization that has found many applications, most notably in estimating Wasserstein distance between two distributions. In this work, we present the first fully dynamic algorithm for Euclidean bi-chromatic matching with sublinear update time. For any fixed $\varepsilon > 0$, our algorithm achieves $O(1/\varepsilon)$-approximation and handles updates in $O(n^{\varepsilon})$ time. Our experiments show that our algorithm enables effective monitoring of the distributional drift in the Wasserstein distance on real and synthetic data sets, while outperforming the runtime of baseline approximations by orders of magnitudes.

We study the problem of computing Chamfer distance in the fully dynamic setting, where two sets of points $A, B \subset \mathbb{R}^{d}$, each of size up to $n$, dynamically evolve through point insertions or deletions and the goal is to efficiently maintain an approximation to $dist_{\mathrm{CH}}(A,B) = \sum_{a \in A} \min_{b \in B} dist(a,b)$, where $dist$ is a distance measure. Chamfer distance is a widely used dissimilarity metric for point clouds, with many practical applications that require repeated evaluation on dynamically changing datasets, e.g., when used as a loss function in machine learning. In this paper, we present the first dynamic algorithm for maintaining an approximation of the Chamfer distance under the $\ell_p$ norm for $p \in$ {$1,2$}. Our algorithm reduces to approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search with little overhead. Plugging in standard ANN bounds, we obtain $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation in $\tilde{O}(\epsilon^{-d})$ update time and $O(1/\epsilon)$-approximation in $\tilde{O}(d n^{\epsilon^2} \epsilon^{-4})$ update time. We evaluate our method on real-world datasets and demonstrate that it performs competitively against natural baselines.

We present a nearly-linear time algorithm for finding a minimum-cost flow in planar graphs with polynomially-bounded integer costs and capacities. The previous fastest algorithm for this problem is based on interior point methods (IPMs) and works for general sparse graphs in O ( n 1.5 ⋅ poly (log n )) time [Daitch-Spielman, STOC’08]. Intuitively, Ω ( n 1.5 ) is a natural runtime barrier for IPM-based methods, since they require \(\sqrt {n}\) iterations, each routing a possibly-dense electrical flow. To break this barrier, we develop a new implicit representation for flows based on generalized nested dissection [Lipton-Rose-Tarjan, SINUM’79] and approximate Schur complements [Kyng-Sachdeva, FOCS’16]. This implicit representation permits us to design a data structure to route an electrical flow with sparse demands in roughly \(\sqrt {n}\) update time, resulting in a total runtime of O ( n ⋅ poly (log n )). Our results immediately extend to all families of separable graphs.

We study the fully-dynamic all-pair shortest paths (APSP) problem on planar graphs: given an$n-\mathbf{vertex}$planar graph$G=(V, E)$undergoing edge insertions and deletions, the goal is to efficiently process these updates and support distance and shortest path queries. We give a$(1+\epsilon)-\mathbf{approximate}$dynamic algorithm that supports edge updates and distance queries in$n^{o(1)}$time, for any$1/\mathbf{poly}(\log n) < \epsilon < 1$. Our result is a significant improvement over the best previously known bound of$\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$on update and query time due to [Abraham, Chechik, and Gavoille, STOC ’12], and bypasses a$\Omega(\sqrt{n})$conditional lower-bound on update and query time for exact fully dynamic planar APSP [Abboud and Dahlgaard, FOCS ’16]. The main technical contribution behind our result is to dynamize the planar emulator construction due to [Chang, Krauthgamer, Tan, STOC ’22].

We study the facility location problem in the dynamic setting, where the goal is to efficiently process an intermixed sequence of point insertions and deletions while maintaining a high quality and stable solution. Although the problem has been studied in the context of general metrics and low-dimensional spaces, much remains unknown concerning dynamic facility location in high dimensional spaces. In this work, we present the first fully dynamic algorithm for facility location in high-dimensional spaces $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. For any $c \geq 1$, our algorithm achieves $O(c)$-approximation, supports point updates in $\tilde{O}(\mathrm{poly}(d)n^{1/c + o(1)})$ amortized time and incurs $O(1)$ amortized recourse. More generally, our result shows that despite the linear-time lower bound on the update time for general metrics, it is possible to achieve sub-linear update times for metric spaces that admit dynamic nearest neighbour oracles. Experiments on real datasets confirm that our algorithm achieves high-quality solutions with low running time, and incurs minimal recourse.

Oblivious routing is a well-studied paradigm that uses static precomputed routing tables for selecting routing paths within a network. Existing oblivious routing schemes with polylogarithmic competitive ratio for general networks are tree-based, in the sense that routing is performed according to a convex combination of trees. However, this restriction to trees leads to a construction that has time quadratic in the size of the network and does not parallelize well. In this paper we study oblivious routing schemes based on electrical routing. In particular, we show that general networks with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges admit a routing scheme that has competitive ratio $O(\log^2 n)$ and consists of a convex combination of only $O(\sqrt{m})$ electrical routings. This immediately leads to an improved construction algorithm with time $\tilde{O}(m^{3/2})$ that can also be implemented in parallel with $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{m})$ depth.

In this paper we give the first efficient algorithms for the k-center problem on dynamic graphs undergoing edge updates. In this problem, the goal is to partition the input into k sets by choosing k centers such that the maximum distance from any data point to its closest center is minimized. It is known that it is NP-hard to get a better than 2 approximation for this problem.

In numerical linear algebra, considerable effort has been devoted to obtaining faster algorithms for linear systems whose underlying matrices exhibit structural properties. A prominent success story is the method of generalized nested dissection [Lipton-Rose-Tarjan’79] for separable matrices. On the other hand, the majority of recent developments in the design of efficient linear program (LP) solvers have not leveraged the ideas underlying these faster linear system solvers nor exploited the separable structure of the constraint matrix.

Designing approximate all-pairs distance oracles in the fully dynamic setting is one of the central problems in dynamic graph algorithms. Despite extensive research on this topic, the first result breaking the O(√n) barrier on the update time for any non-trivial approximation was introduced only recently by Forster, Goranci and Henzinger [SODA’21] who achieved m1/ρ+o(1) amortized update time with a O(log n)3ρ−2 factor in the approximation ratio, for any parameter ρ ≥ 1. In this paper, we give the first constant-stretch fully dynamic distance oracle with small polynomial update and query time. Prior work required either at least a poly-logarithmic approximation or much larger update time. Our result gives a more fine-grained trade-off between stretch and update time, for instance we can achieve constant stretch of O(1/ρ2)4/ρ in amortized update time Õ(nρ), and query time Õ(nρ/8) for any constant parameter 0 < ρ < 1. Our algorithm is randomized and assumes an oblivious adversary. A core technical idea underlying our construction is to design a black-box reduction from decremental approximate hub-labeling schemes to fully dynamic distance oracles, which may be of independent interest. We then apply this reduction repeatedly to an existing decremental algorithm to bootstrap our fully dynamic solution.

We show an (1+ε)-approximation algorithm for maintaining maximum s-t flow under m edge insertions in m^{1/2+o(1)} ε^{-1/2} amortized update time for directed, unweighted graphs. This constitutes the first sublinear dynamic maximum flow algorithm in general sparse graphs with arbitrarily good approximation guarantee. Furthermore we give an algorithm that maintains an exact maximum s-t flow under m edge insertions in an n-node graph in Õ(n^{5/2}) total update time. For sufficiently dense graphs, this gives to the first exact incremental algorithm with sub-linear amortized update time for maintaining maximum flows.

Given a simple n-vertex, m-edge graph G undergoing edge insertions and deletions, we give two new fully dynamic algorithms for exactly maintaining the edge connectivity of G in Õ(n) worst-case update time and Õ(m1-1/16) amortized update time, respectively. Prior to our work, all dynamic edge connectivity algorithms assumed bounded edge connectivity, guaranteed approximate solutions, or were restricted to edge insertions only. Our results answer in the affirmative an open question posed by Thorup [Combinatorica'07].

We present a nearly-linear time algorithm for finding a minimum-cost flow in planar graphs with polynomially bounded integer costs and capacities. The previous fastest algorithm for this problem was based on interior point methods (IPMs) and worked for general sparse graphs in O(n1.5 poly(log n)) time [Daitch-Spielman, STOC'08]. Intuitively, Ω(n1.5) is a natural runtime barrier for IPM based methods, since they require iterations, each routing a possibly-dense electrical flow. To break this barrier, we develop a new implicit representation for flows based on generalized nested-dissection [Lipton-Rose-Tarjan, JSTOR'79] and approximate Schur complements [Kyng-Sachdeva, FOCS'16]. This implicit representation permits us to design a data structure to route an electrical flow with sparse demands in roughly update time, resulting in a total running time of O(n · poly(log n)). Our results immediately extend to all families of separable graphs.

We provide universally-optimal distributed graph algorithms for (1+∊)-approximate shortest path problems including shortest-path-tree and transshipment. The universal optimality of our algorithms guarantees that, on any n-node network G, our algorithm completes in T · no(1) rounds whenever a T-round algorithm exists for G. This includes D · no(1)-round algorithms for any planar or excluded-minor network. Our algorithms never require more than rounds, resulting in the first sub-linear-round distributed algorithm for transshipment. The key technical contribution leading to these results is the first efficient no(1)-competitive linear ℓ1-oblivious routing operator that does not require the use of ℓ1-embeddings. Our construction is simple, solely based on low-diameter decompositions, and—in contrast to all known constructions—directly produces an oblivious flow instead of just an approximation of the optimal flow cost. This also has the benefit of simplifying the interaction with Sherman's multiplicative weight framework [SODA'17] in the distributed setting and its subsequent rounding procedures.

Clustering is one of the most fundamental problems in unsupervised learning with a large number of applications. However, classical clustering algorithms assume that the data is static, thus failing to capture many real-world applications where data is constantly changing and evolving. Driven by this, we study the metric k-center clustering problem in the fully dynamic setting, where the goal is to efficiently maintain a clustering while supporting an intermixed sequence of insertions and deletions of points. This model also supports queries of the form (1) report whether a given point is a center or (2) determine the cluster a point is assigned to. We present a deterministic dynamic algorithm for the k-center clustering problem that provably achieves a (2 + ∊)-approximation in nearly logarithmic update and query time, if the underlying metric has bounded doubling dimension, its aspect ratio is bounded by a polynomial and ∊ is a constant. An important feature of our algorithm is that the update and query times are independent of k. We confirm the practical relevance of this feature via an extensive experimental study which shows that for large values of k, our algorithmic construction outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm in terms of solution quality and running time.

We study distributed algorithms built around minor-based vertex sparsifiers, and give the first algorithm in the CONGEST model for solving linear systems in graph Laplacian matrices to high accuracy. Our Laplacian solver has a round complexity of$O(n^{o(1)}(\sqrt{n}+D))$, and thus almost matches the lower bound of$\widetilde{\Omega}(\sqrt{n}+D)$, where$n$is the number of nodes in the network and$D$is its diameter. We show that our distributed solver yields new sublinear round algorithms for several cornerstone problems in combinatorial optimization. This is achieved by leveraging the powerful algorithmic framework of Interior Point Methods (IPMs) and the Laplacian paradigm in the context of distributed graph algorithms, which entails numerically solving optimization problems on graphs via a series of Laplacian systems. Problems that benefit from our distributed algorithmic paradigm include exact mincost flow, negative weight shortest paths, maxflow, and bipartite matching on sparse directed graphs. For the maxflow problem, this is the first exact distributed algorithm that applies to directed graphs, while the previous work by [Ghaffari et al. SICOMP'18] considered the approximate setting and works only for undirected graphs. For the mincost flow and the negative weight shortest path problems, our results constitute the first exact distributed algorithms running in a sublinear number of rounds. Given that the hybrid between IPMs and the Laplacian paradigm has proven useful for tackling numerous optimization problems in the centralized setting, we believe that our distributed solver will find future applications. At the heart of our distributed Laplacian solver is the notion of spectral subspace sparsifiers of [Li, Schild FOCS'18]. We present a nontrivial distributed implementation of their construction by (i) giving a parallel variant of their algorithm that avoids the sampling of random spanning trees and uses approximate leverage scores instead, and (ii) showing that the algorithm still produces a high-quality subspace spectral sparsifier by carefully setting up and analyzing matrix martingales. Combining this vertex reduction recursively with both tree and elimination-based preconditioners leads to our algorithm for solving Laplacian systems. The construction of the elimination-based preconditioners is based on computing short random walks, and we introduce a new technique for reducing the congestion incurred by the simulation of these walks on weighted graphs.

Effective resistance is an important metric that measures the similarity of two vertices in a graph. It has found applications in graph clustering, recommendation systems and network reliability, among others. In spite of the importance of the effective resistances, we still lack efficient algorithms to exactly compute or approximate them on massive graphs.

We give the first non-trivial fully dynamic probabilistic tree embedding algorithm for a weighted, undirected graph G with n nodes and at most m edges undergoing edge insertions and deletions. The goal in this problem is to maintain a tree containing all nodes of G with a randomized algorithm such that for every edge (u, v) of G the expected length of the path from u to v in the tree exceeds the weight of the edge (u, v) only by a small multiplicative factor, called the stretch of the embedding. In this paper, we obtain a trade-off between amortized update time and expected stretch against an oblivious adversary. At the two extremes of this trade-off, we can maintain a tree of expected stretch O(log4 n) with update time m1/2+o(1) or a tree of expected stretch no(1) with update time no(1) (for edge weights polynomial in n). A guarantee of the latter type has so far only been known for maintaining tree embeddings with average (instead of expected) stretch [Chechik/Zhang, SODA '20]. Our main result has direct implications to fully dynamic approximate distance oracles and fully dynamic buy-at-bulk network design as our trade-off from above carries over to these two problems with minor overheads. For dynamic distance oracles, our result is the first to break the update-time barrier. For buy-at-bulk network design, a problem which also in the static setting heavily relies on probabilistic tree embeddings, we give the first non-trivial dynamic algorithm. As probabilistic tree embeddings are an important tool in static approximation algorithms, we expect our result to have further applications in dynamic approximation algorithms. From a technical perspective, we obtain our main result by first designing a decremental (i.e., deletionsonly) algorithm for probabilistic low-diameter decompositions via a careful combination of Bartal's ball-growing approach [FOCS ‘96] with the pruning framework of Chechik and Zhang [SODA ‘20]. Such a low-diameter decomposition is the heart of Bartal's seminal tree embedding construction and we show how to adapt it to the decremental setting. We then extend this to a fully dynamic algorithm by significantly enriching a well-known “decremental to fully dynamic” reduction with a new bootstrapping idea to recursively employ a fully dynamic algorithm instead of a static one in this reduction. By additionally exploiting certain properties of our tree embedding, this bootstrapping scheme can be made highly efficient.

We introduce a notion for hierarchical graph clustering which we call the expander hierarchy and show a fully dynamic algorithm for maintaining such a hierarchy on a graph with n vertices undergoing edge insertions and deletions using no(1) update time. An expander hierarchy is a tree representation of graphs that faithfully captures the cut-flow structure and consequently our dynamic algorithm almost immediately implies several results including: The first fully dynamic algorithm with no(1) worst-case update time that allows querying no(1)-approximate conductance, s-t maximum flows, and s-t minimum cuts for any given (s, t) in O(log1/6 n) time. Our results are deterministic and extend to multi-commodity cuts and flows. All previous fully dynamic (or even decremental) algorithms for any of these problems take Ω(n) update or query time. The key idea behind these results is a fully dynamic algorithm for maintaining a tree flow sparsifier, a notion introduced by Räcke [FOCS'02] for constructing competitive oblivious routing schemes. A deterministic fully dynamic connectivity algorithm with no(1) worst-case update time. This significantly simplifies the recent algorithm by Chuzhoy et al. that uses the framework of Nanongkai, Saranurak, and Wulff-Nilsen [FOCS'17]. A deterministic fully dynamic treewidth decomposition algorithm on constant-degree graphs with no(1) worst-case update time that maintains a treewidth decomposition of width tw(G) · no(1) where tw(G) denotes the treewidth of the current graph. This is the first non-trivial dynamic algorithm for this problem. Our technique is based on a new stronger notion of the expander decomposition, called the boundary-linked expander decomposition. This decomposition is more robust against updates and better captures clustering structure of graphs compared to the standard expander decomposition. Given that the expander decomposition has proved extremely useful in many fields, including approximation, sketching, distributed, and dynamic algorithms, we expect that our new notion will find more future applications.

We present a general framework of designing efficient dynamic approximate algorithms for optimization problems on undirected graphs. In particular, we develop a technique that, given any problem that admits a certain notion of vertex sparsifiers, gives data structures that maintain approximate solutions in sub-linear update and query time. We illustrate the applicability of our paradigm to the following problems. (1)A fully-dynamic algorithm that approximates all-pair maximum-flows/minimum-cuts up to a nearly logarithmic factor in ~O(n2/3)11The ~O(·) notation is used in this paper to hide poly-logarithmic factors. amortized time against an oblivious adversary, and ~O(m3/4) time against an adaptive adversary. (2)An incremental data structure that maintains O(1) - approximate shortest path in no(1)time per operation, as well as fully dynamic approximate all-pair shortest path and transshipment in ~O(n2/3+o(1)) amortized time per operation. (3)A fully-dynamic algorithm that approximates all-pair effective resistance up to an ( 1+ε) factor in ~O(n2/3+o(1)ε-O(1)) amortized update time per operation. The key tool behind result (1) is the dynamic maintenance of an algorithmic construction due to Madry [FOCS' 10], which partitions a graph into a collection of simpler graph structures (known as j-trees) and approximately captures the cut-flow and metric structure of the graph. The O(1)-approximation guarantee of (2) is by adapting the distance oracles by [Thorup-Zwick JACM '05]. Result (3) is obtained by invoking the random-walk based spectral vertex sparsifier by [Durfee et al. STOC '19] in a hierarchical manner, while carefully keeping track of the recourse among levels in the hierarchy. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.02368.pdf for the full version of this paper.

Graph embeddings are a ubiquitous tool for machine learning tasks, such as node classification and link prediction, on graph-structured data. However, computing the embeddings for large-scale graphs is prohibitively inefficient even if we are interested only in a small subset of relevant vertices. To address this, we present an efficient graph coarsening approach, based on Schur complements, for computing the embedding of the relevant vertices. We prove that these embeddings are preserved exactly by the Schur complement graph that is obtained via Gaussian elimination on the non-relevant vertices. As computing Schur complements is expensive, we give a nearly-linear time algorithm that generates a coarsened graph on the relevant vertices that provably matches the Schur complement in expectation in each iteration. Our experiments involving prediction tasks on graphs demonstrate that computing embeddings on the coarsened graph, rather than the entire graph, leads to significant time savings without sacrificing accuracy.

Graph sparsification aims at compressing large graphs into smaller ones while preserving important characteristics of the input graph. In this work we study vertex sparsifiers, i.e., sparsifiers whose goal is to reduce the number of vertices. We focus on the following notions: (1) Given a digraph $G=(V,E)$ and terminal vertices $K \subset V$ with $|K| = k$, a (vertex) reachability sparsifier of $G$ is a digraph $H=(V_H,E_H)$, $K \subset V_H$ that preserves all reachability information among terminal pairs. Let $|V_H|$ denote the size of $H$. In this work we introduce the notion of reachability-preserving minors (RPMs), i.e., we require $H$ to be a minor of $G$. We show any directed graph $G$ admits an RPM $H$ of size $O(k^3)$, and if $G$ is planar, then the size of $H$ improves to $O(k^{2} \log k)$. We complement our upper bound by showing that there exists an infinite family of grids such that any RPM must have $\Omega(k^{2})$ vertices. (2) Given a weighted undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ and terminal vertices $K$ with $|K|=k$, an exact (vertex) cut sparsifier of $G$ is a graph $H$ with $K \subset V_H$ that preserves the value of minimum cuts separating any bipartition of $K$. We show that planar graphs with all the $k$ terminals lying on the same face admit exact cut sparsifiers of size $O(k^{2})$ that are also planar. Our result extends to flow and distance sparsifiers. It improves the previous best-known bound of $O(k^22^{2k})$ for cut and flow sparsifiers by an exponential factor and matches an $\Omega(k^2)$ lower-bound for this class of graphs.

We study dynamic algorithms for maintaining spectral vertex sparsifiers of graphs with respect to a set of terminals T of our choice. Such objects preserve pairwise resistances, solutions to systems of linear equations, and energy of electrical flows between the terminals in T. We give a data structure that supports insertions and deletions of edges, and terminal additions, all in sublinear time. We then show the applicability of our result to the following problems.

Spanning trees of low average stretch on the non-tree edges, as introduced by Alon et al. [SICOMP 1995], are a natural graph-theoretic object. In recent years, they have found significant applications in solvers for symmetric diagonally dominant (SDD) linear systems. In this work, we provide the first dynamic algorithm for maintaining such trees under edge insertions and deletions to the input graph. Our algorithm has update time n1/2 + o(1) and the average stretch of the maintained tree is no(1) , which matches the stretch in the seminal result of Alon et al.

We study the metric facility location problem with client insertions and deletions. This setting differs from the classic dynamic facility location problem, where the set of clients remains the same, but the metric space can change over time. We show a deterministic algorithm that maintains a constant factor approximation to the optimal solution in worst-case time O~(2^{O(kappa^2)}) per client insertion or deletion in metric spaces while answering queries about the cost in O(1) time, where kappa denotes the doubling dimension of the metric. For metric spaces with bounded doubling dimension, the update time is polylogarithmic in the parameters of the problem.

We consider the problem of dynamically maintaining (approximate) all-pairs effective resistances in separable graphs, which are those that admit an $n^{c}$-separator theorem for some $c<1$. We give a fully dynamic algorithm that maintains $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximations of the all-pairs effective resistances of an $n$-vertex graph $G$ undergoing edge insertions and deletions with $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n}/\varepsilon^2)$ worst-case update time and $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n}/\varepsilon^2)$ worst-case query time, if $G$ is guaranteed to be $\sqrt{n}$-separable (i.e., it is taken from a class satisfying a $\sqrt{n}$-separator theorem) and its separator can be computed in $\tilde{O}(n)$ time. Our algorithm is built upon a dynamic algorithm for maintaining \emph{approximate Schur complement} that approximately preserves pairwise effective resistances among a set of terminals for separable graphs, which might be of independent interest. We complement our result by proving that for any two fixed vertices $s$ and $t$, no incremental or decremental algorithm can maintain the $s-t$ effective resistance for $\sqrt{n}$-separable graphs with worst-case update time $O(n^{1/2-δ})$ and query time $O(n^{1-δ})$ for any $δ>0$, unless the Online Matrix Vector Multiplication (OMv) conjecture is false. We further show that for \emph{general} graphs, no incremental or decremental algorithm can maintain the $s-t$ effective resistance problem with worst-case update time $O(n^{1-δ})$ and query-time $O(n^{2-δ})$ for any $δ>0$, unless the OMv conjecture is false.

We present a deterministic incremental algorithm for exactly maintaining the size of a minimum cut with O (log 3 n log log 2 n ) amortized time per edge insertion and O (1) query time. This result partially answers an open question posed by Thorup (2007). It also stays in sharp contrast to a polynomial conditional lower bound for the fully dynamic weighted minimum cut problem. Our algorithm is obtained by combining a sparsification technique of Kawarabayashi and Thorup (2015) or its recent improvement by Henzinger, Rao, and Wang (2017), and an exact incremental algorithm of Henzinger (1997). We also study space-efficient incremental algorithms for the minimum cut problem. Concretely, we show that there exists an O ( n log n /ε 2 ) space Monte Carlo algorithm that can process a stream of edge insertions starting from an empty graph, and with high probability, the algorithm maintains a (1+ε)-approximation to the minimum cut. The algorithm has O ((α ( n ) log 3 n )/ε 2 ) amortized update time and constant query time, where α ( n ) stands for the inverse of Ackermann function.

Given an edge-weighted graph G with a set Q of k terminals, a mimicking network is a graph with the same set of terminals that exactly preserves the sizes of minimum cuts between any partition of the terminals. A natural question in the area of graph compression is to provide as small mimicking networks as possible for input graph G being either an arbitrary graph or coming from a specific graph class. In this note we show an exponential lower bound for cut mimicking networks in planar graphs: there are edge-weighted planar graphs with k terminals that require 2^(k-2) edges in any mimicking network. This nearly matches an upper bound of O(k * 2^(2k)) of Krauthgamer and Rika [SODA 2013, arXiv:1702.05951] and is in sharp contrast with the O(k^2) upper bound under the assumption that all terminals lie on a single face [Goranci, Henzinger, Peng, arXiv:1702.01136]. As a side result we show a hard instance for the double-exponential upper bounds given by Hagerup, Katajainen, Nishimura, and Ragde [JCSS 1998], Khan and Raghavendra [IPL 2014], and Chambers and Eppstein [JGAA 2013].

We introduce a new algorithmic framework for designing dynamic graph algorithms in minor-free graphs, by exploiting the structure of such graphs and a tool called vertex sparsification, which is a way to compress large graphs into small ones that well preserve relevant properties among a subset of vertices and has previously mainly been used in the design of approximation algorithms. Using this framework, we obtain a Monte Carlo randomized fully dynamic algorithm for (1 + epsilon)-approximating the energy of electrical flows in n-vertex planar graphs with tilde{O}(r epsilon^{-2}) worst-case update time and tilde{O}((r + n / sqrt{r}) epsilon^{-2}) worst-case query time, for any r larger than some constant. For r=n^{2/3}, this gives tilde{O}(n^{2/3} epsilon^{-2}) update time and tilde{O}(n^{2/3} epsilon^{-2}) query time. We also extend this algorithm to work for minor-free graphs with similar approximation and running time guarantees. Furthermore, we illustrate our framework on the all-pairs max flow and shortest path problems by giving corresponding dynamic algorithms in minor-free graphs with both sublinear update and query times. To the best of our knowledge, our results are the first to systematically establish such a connection between dynamic graph algorithms and vertex sparsification. We also present both upper bound and lower bound for maintaining the energy of electrical flows in the incremental subgraph model, where updates consist of only vertex activations, which might be of independent interest.

We present a deterministic incremental algorithm for \textit{exactly} maintaining the size of a minimum cut with $\widetilde{O}(1)$ amortized time per edge insertion and $O(1)$ query time. This result partially answers an open question posed by Thorup [Combinatorica 2007]. It also stays in sharp contrast to a polynomial conditional lower-bound for the fully-dynamic weighted minimum cut problem. Our algorithm is obtained by combining a recent sparsification technique of Kawarabayashi and Thorup [STOC 2015] and an exact incremental algorithm of Henzinger [J. of Algorithm 1997]. We also study space-efficient incremental algorithms for the minimum cut problem. Concretely, we show that there exists an ${O}(n\log n/\varepsilon^2)$ space Monte-Carlo algorithm that can process a stream of edge insertions starting from an empty graph, and with high probability, the algorithm maintains a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation to the minimum cut. The algorithm has $\widetilde{O}(1)$ amortized update-time and constant query-time.

Given a graph where vertices are partitioned into $k$ terminals and non-terminals, the goal is to compress the graph (i.e., reduce the number of non-terminals) using minor operations while preserving terminal distances approximately.The distortion of a compressed graph is the maximum multiplicative blow-up of distances between all pairs of terminals. We study the trade-off between the number of non-terminals and the distortion. This problem generalizes the Steiner Point Removal (SPR) problem, in which all non-terminals must be removed. We introduce a novel black-box reduction to convert any lower bound on distortion for the SPR problem into a super-linear lower bound on the number of non-terminals, with the same distortion, for our problem. This allows us to show that there exist graphs such that every minor with distortion less than $2~/~2.5~/~3$ must have $Ω(k^2)~/~Ω(k^{5/4})~/~Ω(k^{6/5})$ non-terminals, plus more trade-offs in between. The black-box reduction has an interesting consequence: if the tight lower bound on distortion for the SPR problem is super-constant, then allowing any $O(k)$ non-terminals will not help improving the lower bound to a constant. We also build on the existing results on spanners, distance oracles and connected 0-extensions to show a number of upper bounds for general graphs, planar graphs, graphs that exclude a fixed minor and bounded treewidth graphs. Among others, we show that any graph admits a minor with $O(\log k)$ distortion and $O(k^{2})$ non-terminals, and any planar graph admits a minor with $1+\varepsilon$ distortion and $\widetilde{O}((k/\varepsilon)^{2})$ non-terminals.