We improve the best known lower bound on the integrality gap for weighted unit-demand multicommodity flow on trees from $1/4$ to $2/5$, improving on the long-standing bound of Chekuri, Mydlarz, and Shepherd~\cite{CMS}. We give the proof in two stages. First, a surprisingly simple packing lemma and an inductive coloring argument give an intermediate bound of $4/11$. We then refine the argument to obtain $2/5$.
We show that the balancing weights technique of Li (2026) actually produces an approximate *pseudo-circulation* of a directed, capacitated graph in $m^{1+o(1)}$ time. Together with standard flow techniques, we obtain an $m^{1+o(1)}$ time maximum flow algorithm that avoids the interior-point method framework of recent a...
In this short note, we show that $H$-minor-free graphs have a tree cover with $3$ trees and constant stretch for any fixed graph $H$. The number of trees matches the recent lower bound by Chen, Tan, and Xu who showed that a toroidal grid requires at least $3$ trees for constant stretch. Our result is obtained by establ...
Hung Le, H. Pham, Cuong V. Than et al.· 0 citations
Smith's conjecture asserts that in every $k$-connected graph with $k\geq 2$, any two longest cycles intersect in at least $k$ vertices. In this work, we establish an $\Omega(k^{8/11})$ bound for this conjecture, improving upon the $\Omega(k^{2/3})$ bound of Ma and Zhao. Our proof combines a Ramsey theoretic refinement...
We give a sublinear-time algorithm for estimating the size of a maximal independent set in a graph using adjacency-query access with expected running time $\tilde{O}(n^{1+1/3})$, improving over the previous $\tilde{O}(n^{1+1/2})$ bound of Mahadabi et al. [MRTV26]. As a consequence of a reduction of [MRTV26], this also...
Let $G$ be the line graph of a finite simple graph, with $n\geq1$ vertices and maximum degree $\Delta$. We prove that single-site Glauber dynamics for uniform proper $q$-colorings mixes in $O_\Delta(n\log(n/\varepsilon))$ steps for every integer $q\geq\Delta+5$. Our proof uses the Bochner framework of Chen and Liu (202...
Given a graph $G$, we show that the mixed metric dimension of $G$ is exactly $\ell(G)+2c(G)$ if and only if $G$ is either a cactus graph in which every cycle has precisely one vertex of degree at least $3$, or a balanced $\Theta$-graph, where $\ell(G)$ and $c(G)$ denote the number of leaves and the cyclomatic number of...
Shi Chen, Xuan-Long Ma· 0 citations
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