Fast Maximum Common Subgraph Search: A Redundancy-Reduced Backtracking Approach
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given two input graphs, finding the largest subgraph that occurs in both, i.e., finding the maximum common subgraph, is a fundamental operator for evaluating the similarity between two graphs in graph data analysis. Existing works for solving the problem are of either theoretical or practical interest, but not both. Specifically, the algorithms with a theoretical guarantee on the running time are known to be not practically efficient; algorithms following the recently proposed backtracking framework called McSplit, run fast in practice but do not have any theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we propose a new backtracking algorithm called RRSplit, which at once achieves better practical efficiency and provides a non-trivial theoretical guarantee on the worst-case running time. To achieve the former, we develop a series of reductions and upper bounds for reducing redundant computations, i.e., the time for exploring some unpromising branches of exploration that hold no maximum common subgraph. To achieve the latter, we formally prove that RRSplit incurs a worst-case time complexity which matches the best-known complexity for the problem. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark graph collections, and the results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the practical state-of-the-art by several orders of magnitude.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.016 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it