Global vs. s-t Vertex Connectivity Beyond Sequential: Almost-Perfect Reductions and Near-Optimal Separations
2025 (English)In: STOC 2025 - Proceedings of the 57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2025, p. 2305-2316Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
A recent breakthrough by [LNPSY STOC'21] showed that solving s-t vertex connectivity is sufficient (up to polylogarithmic factors) to solve (global) vertex connectivity in the sequential model. This raises a natural question: What is the relationship between s-t and global vertex connectivity in other computational models? In this paper, we demonstrate that the connection between global and s-t variants behaves very differently across computational models. In parallel and distributed models, we obtain almost tight reductions from global to s-t vertex connectivity. In PRAM, this leads to a nω+o(1)-work and no(1)-depth algorithm for vertex connectivity, improving over the 35-year-old Õ(nω+1-work O(log2n)-depth algorithm by [LLW FOCS'86], where ω is the matrix multiplication exponent and n is the number of vertices. In CONGEST, the reduction implies the first sublinear-round vertex connectivity algorithm when the diameter is moderately small. This answers an open question in [JM STOC'23]. In contrast, we show that global vertex connectivity is strictly harder than s-t vertex connectivity in the two-party communication setting, requiring n1.5 bits of communication. The s-t variant was known to be solvable in Õ(n) communication [BvdBEMN FOCS'22]. Our results resolve open problems raised by [MN STOC'20, BvdBEMN FOCS'22, AS SOSA'23]. At the heart of our results is a new graph decomposition framework we call common-neighborhood clustering, which can be applied in multiple models. Finally, we observe that global vertex connectivity cannot be solved without using s-t vertex connectivity by proving an s-t to global reduction in dense graphs in the PRAM and communication models.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2025. p. 2305-2316
Keywords [en]
Algorithmic Graph Theory, Distributed Computation, Parallel Computation, Vertex Connectivity
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-368914DOI: 10.1145/3717823.3718316Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105009803174OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-368914DiVA, id: diva2:1991294
Conference
57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 2025, Prague, Czechia, June 23-27, 2025
Note
Part of ISBN 9798400715105
QC 20250822
2025-08-222025-08-222025-08-22Bibliographically approved