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Main Authors: Davies, Sami, Vassilvitskii, Sergei, Wang, Yuyan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18568
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author Davies, Sami
Vassilvitskii, Sergei
Wang, Yuyan
author_facet Davies, Sami
Vassilvitskii, Sergei
Wang, Yuyan
contents Push-Relabel is one of the most celebrated network flow algorithms. Maintaining a pre-flow that saturates a cut, it enjoys better theoretical and empirical running time than other flow algorithms, such as Ford-Fulkerson. In practice, Push-Relabel is even faster than what theoretical guarantees can promise, in part because of the use of good heuristics for seeding and updating the iterative algorithm. However, it remains unclear how to run Push-Relabel on an arbitrary initialization that is not necessarily a pre-flow or cut-saturating. We provide the first theoretical guarantees for warm-starting Push-Relabel with a predicted flow, where our learning-augmented version benefits from fast running time when the predicted flow is close to an optimal flow, while maintaining robust worst-case guarantees. Interestingly, our algorithm uses the gap relabeling heuristic, which has long been employed in practice, even though prior to our work there was no rigorous theoretical justification for why it can lead to run-time improvements. We then provide experiments that show our warm-started Push-Relabel also works well in practice.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_18568
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Warm-starting Push-Relabel
Davies, Sami
Vassilvitskii, Sergei
Wang, Yuyan
Data Structures and Algorithms
Machine Learning
Push-Relabel is one of the most celebrated network flow algorithms. Maintaining a pre-flow that saturates a cut, it enjoys better theoretical and empirical running time than other flow algorithms, such as Ford-Fulkerson. In practice, Push-Relabel is even faster than what theoretical guarantees can promise, in part because of the use of good heuristics for seeding and updating the iterative algorithm. However, it remains unclear how to run Push-Relabel on an arbitrary initialization that is not necessarily a pre-flow or cut-saturating. We provide the first theoretical guarantees for warm-starting Push-Relabel with a predicted flow, where our learning-augmented version benefits from fast running time when the predicted flow is close to an optimal flow, while maintaining robust worst-case guarantees. Interestingly, our algorithm uses the gap relabeling heuristic, which has long been employed in practice, even though prior to our work there was no rigorous theoretical justification for why it can lead to run-time improvements. We then provide experiments that show our warm-started Push-Relabel also works well in practice.
title Warm-starting Push-Relabel
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18568