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Record W7105602842 · doi:10.1109/tsmc.2025.3629990

HyColor: An Efficient Heuristic Algorithm for Graph Coloring

2025· article· W7105602842 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueIEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics Systems · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicScheduling and Timetabling Solutions
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
FundersNational Natural Science Foundation of China
KeywordsGraph coloringGreedy coloringHeuristicGreedy algorithmGraphFractional coloringEfficient algorithmEdge coloring

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The graph coloring problem (GCP) is a classic combinatorial optimization problem that aims to find the minimum number of colors assigned to the vertices of a graph such that no two adjacent vertices receive the same color. GCP has been extensively studied by researchers from various fields, including mathematics, computer science, and biological science. Due to the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {NP}$</tex-math> </inline-formula>-hard nature, many heuristic algorithms have been proposed to solve GCP. However, existing GCP algorithms focus on either small hard graphs or large-scale sparse graphs (with up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10^{7}$</tex-math> </inline-formula> vertices). This article presents an efficient hybrid heuristic algorithm for GCP, named <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">HyColor</small>, which excels in handling large-scale sparse graphs while achieving impressive results on small dense graphs. The efficiency of <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">HyColor</small> comes from the following three aspects: 1) a local decision strategy to improve the lower bound on the chromatic number; 2) a graph-reduction strategy to reduce the working graph; and 3) a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math> </inline-formula>-core and mixed degree-based greedy heuristic for efficiently coloring graphs. <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">HyColor</small> is evaluated against three state-of-the-art GCP algorithms across four benchmarks, comprising three large-scale sparse graph benchmarks and one small dense graph benchmark, totaling 209 instances. The results demonstrate that <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">HyColor</small> consistently outperforms existing heuristic algorithms in both solution accuracy and computational efficiency for the majority of instances. Notably, <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">HyColor</small> achieved the best solutions in 194 instances (over 93%), with 34 of these solutions significantly surpassing those of other algorithms. Furthermore, <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">HyColor</small> successfully determined the chromatic number and achieved optimal coloring in 128 instances.

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Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Scholarly communication
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.946
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0020.001
Scholarly communication0.0030.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.052
GPT teacher head0.331
Teacher spread0.279 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it