We study the problem of approximating all-pair distances in a weighted undirected graph with differential privacy, introduced by Sealfon [Sea16]. Given a publicly known undirected graph, we treat the weights of edges as sensitive information, and two graphs are neighbors if their edge weights differ in one edge by at most one. We obtain efficient algorithms with significantly improved bounds on a broad class of graphs which we refer to as recursively separable. In particular, for any n-vertex Kh-minor-free graph, our algorithm achieve an additive error of eO(h(nW)1/3), where W represents the maximum edge weight; For grid graphs, the same algorithmic scheme achieve additive error of eO(n1/4 W). Our approach can be seen as a generalization of the celebrated binary tree mechanism for range queries, as releasing range queries is equivalent to computing all-pair distances on a path graph. In essence, our approach is based on generalizing the binary tree mechanism to graphs that are recursively separable. JL and ZZ have been supported by National Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 62472212 and the New Cornerstone Science Foundation. Supported in part by NSF award 2228995 JU's research was funded by the NSFCNS 2433628, Google Seed Fund grant, Google Research Scholar Award, Dean Research Seed Fund, and Rutgers Decanal Grant no.

The goal of this work is to design architectures for efficiently learning complete invariants of planar graphs.

Graph generative modelling has become an essential task due to the wide range of applications in chemistry, biology, social networks, and knowledge representation. In this work, we propose a novel framework for generating graphs by adapting the Generator Matching (arXiv:2410.20587) paradigm to graph-structured data. We leverage the graph Laplacian and its associated heat kernel to define a continous-time diffusion on each graph. The Laplacian serves as the infinitesimal generator of this diffusion, and its heat kernel provides a family of conditional perturbations of the initial graph. A neural network is trained to match this generator by minimising a Bregman divergence between the true generator and a learnable surrogate. Once trained, the surrogate generator is used to simulate a time-reversed diffusion process to sample new graph structures. Our framework unifies and generalises existing diffusion-based graph generative models, injecting domain-specific inductive bias via the Laplacian, while retaining the flexibility of neural approximators. Experimental studies demonstrate that our approach captures structural properties of real and synthetic graphs effectively.

Graph neural networks are prominent models for representation learning over graphs, where the idea is to iteratively compute representations of nodes of an input graph through a series of transformations in such a way that the learned graph function is isomorphism-invariant on graphs, which makes the learned representations graph invariants. On the other hand, it is well-known that graph invariants learned by these class of models are incomplete: there are pairs of non-isomorphic graphs which cannot be distinguished by standard graph neural networks. This is unsurprising given the computational difficulty of graph isomorphism testing on general graphs, but the situation begs to differ for special graph classes, for which efficient graph isomorphism testing algorithms are known, such as planar graphs. The goal of this work is to design architectures for efficiently learning complete invariants of planar graphs. Inspired by the classical planar graph isomorphism algorithm of Hopcroft and Tarjan, we propose PlanE as a framework for planar representation learning. PlanE includes architectures which can learn complete invariants over planar graphs while remaining practically scalable.

We study a Stackelberg variant of the classical Most Vital Links problem, modeled as a one-round adversarial game between an attacker and a defender. The attacker strategically removes up to $k$ edges from a flow network to maximally disrupt flow between a source $s$ and a sink $t$, after which the defender optimally reroutes the remaining flow. To capture this attacker--defender interaction, we introduce a new mathematical model of discounted cuts, in which the cost of a cut is evaluated by excluding its $k$ most expensive edges. This model generalizes the Most Vital Links problem and uncovers novel algorithmic and complexity-theoretic properties. We develop a unified algorithmic framework for analyzing various forms of discounted cut problems, including minimizing or maximizing the cost of a cut under discount mechanisms that exclude either the $k$ most expensive or the $k$ cheapest edges. While most variants are NP-complete on general graphs, our main result establishes polynomial-time solvability for all discounted cut problems in our framework when the input is restricted to bounded-genus graphs, a relevant class that includes many real-world networks such as transportation and infrastructure networks. With this work, we aim to open collaborative bridges between artificial intelligence, algorithmic game theory, and operations research.

This concern was likely well-founded. After all, Poincaré, von Neumann, Gauss, and Feynman have all been credited with remarkable contributions to mathematics and physics owing in large part to their tremendously fine numerical intuition, itself iteratively refined through a lifetime of obsessive internal calculation. More recently, philosophers and scientists have begun to wrestle with a set of epistemological concerns that arise from the use of forms of computation in science that are far more powerful than mere calculators. For instance, it has been argued that increasingly routine reliance on artificial intelligence leads scientists to adopt beliefs that are not fully justifiable due to the complexity and opacity of the models that support them. Moreover, it has been argued that the epistemic opacity of these systems limits scientific understanding of the phenomena under investigation, perhaps raising a dark veil between the practice of science and scientific knowledge.

We study the problem of hierarchical clustering on planar graphs. We formulate this in terms of finding the closest ultrametric to a specified set of distances and solve it using an LP relaxation that leverages minimum cost perfect matching as a subroutine to efficiently explore the space of planar partitions. We apply our algorithm to the problem of hierarchical image segmentation.