Minimum Stable Cut and Treewidth

A stable or locally-optimal cut of a graph is a cut whose weight cannot be increased by changing the side of a single vertex. In this paper we study Minimum Stable Cut, the problem of finding a stable cut of minimum weight. Since this problem is NP-hard, we study its complexity on graphs of low treewidth, low degree, or both. We begin by showing that the problem remains weakly NP-hard on severely restricted trees, so bounding treewidth alone cannot make it tractable. We match this hardness with a pseudo-polynomial DP algorithm solving the problem in time (Δ· W)O(tw)nO(1), where $tw$ is the treewidth, $Δ$ the maximum degree, and W the maximum weight. On the other hand, bounding $Δ$ is also not enough, as the problem is NP-hard for unweighted graphs of bounded degree. We therefore parameterize Minimum Stable Cut by both $tw$ and $Δ$ and obtain an FPT algorithm running in time 2O(Δtw)(n+log W)O(1). Our main result for the weighted problem is to provide a reduction showing that both aforementioned algorithms are essentially optimal, even if we replace treewidth by pathwidth: if there exists an algorithm running in (nW)ᵒ⁽ᵖʷ⁾ or 2o(Δpw)(n+log W)O(1), then the ETH is false. Complementing this, we show that we can, however, obtain an FPT approximation scheme parameterized by treewidth, if we consider almost-stable solutions, that is, solutions where no single vertex can unilaterally increase the weight of its incident cut edges by more than a factor of (1+ε). Motivated by these mostly negative results, we consider Unweighted Minimum Stable Cut. Here our results already imply a much faster exact algorithm running in time ΔO(tw)nO(1). We show that this is also probably essentially optimal: an algorithm running in nᵒ⁽ᵖʷ⁾ would contradict the ETH. Full version of ICALP 2021 paper