Optimal Rounding for Sparsest Cut

Alan Chang, Assaf Naor, Kevin Ren

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We prove that the integrality gap of the Goemans-Linial semidefinite program for the Sparsest Cut problem (with general capacities and demands) on inputs of size n≥ 2 is (λlogn). We achieve this by establishing the following geometric/structural result. If (M,d) is an n-point metric space of negative type, then for every τ>0 there is a random subset Z of M such that for any pair of points x,yϵ M with d(x,y)≥ τ, the probability that both xϵ Z and d(y,Z)≥ βτ/λ1+log(|B(y,κ β τ)|/|B(y,β τ)|) is ω(1), where 0<β<1<κ are universal constants. The proof relies on a refinement of the Arora-Rao-Vazirani rounding technique.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSTOC 2025 - Proceedings of the 57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing
EditorsMichal Koucky, Nikhil Bansal
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages643-652
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9798400715105
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 15 2025
Event57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2025 - Prague, Czech Republic
Duration: Jun 23 2025Jun 27 2025

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing
ISSN (Print)0737-8017

Conference

Conference57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2025
Country/TerritoryCzech Republic
CityPrague
Period6/23/256/27/25

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software

Keywords

  • metric embeddings
  • semidefinite programming
  • Sparsest Cut problem

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