Improved Upper Bounds on Multiflow-Multicut Gaps in Cactus Graphs
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given a set of source-sink pairs, the maximum multiflow problem asks for the largest total amount of flow that can be feasibly routed between them. The minimum multicut problem, which is dual to multiflow, seeks the lowest-cost set of edges whose removal disconnects all source-sink pairs. It is straightforward to see that the value of a minimum multicut is at least that of the corresponding maximum multiflow. The ratio between the two is known as the multiflow-multicut gap. The classical max-flow min-cut theorem tells us that this gap is exactly one when there is only a single source-sink pair. However, for multiple source-sink pairs, the gap can be arbitrarily large. In this work, we investigate the multiflow-multicut gap in cactus graphs, and establish the following results (i) tight upper bound of 1.5 for cycle (ii) an upper bound of 2 + 2/(ln 2) < 3.45 for general cactus graph (iii) tight upper bound of 2 for unicyclic graphs, where the graph contains exactly one cycle (iv) tight upper bound of 2 for path cactus graphs, where cycles are arranged along a single path. We develop novel generalizations of the classical rounding algorithm to establish our results.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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