Lucas Fabian Naumann

Jannik Irmai, Lucas Fabian Naumann, Bjoern Andres

The multicut problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with diverse applications in fields such as bioinformatics, data mining and computer vision. Graph neural networks have been defined for the multicut problem but can be adapted further to its specific objective function and constraints. In this article, we introduce such an adapted graph neural network architecture in which features are assigned only to edges, and the computation of messages is based on triangles in the underlying graph. Experiments with synthetic and real-world instances with up to 200 nodes show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art heuristic solvers in terms of solution quality while maintaining feasible runtimes. For some instances, our method finds optimal solutions in seconds whereas exact solvers need hours to find and certify optimal solutions.

Lucas Fabian Naumann, Jannik Irmai, Shengxian Zhao et al.

The lifted multicut problem is a combinatorial optimization problem whose feasible solutions relate one-to-one to the decompositions of a graph $G = (V, E)$. Given an augmentation $\widehat{G} = (V, E \cup F)$ of $G$ and given costs $c \in \mathbb{R}^{E \cup F}$, the objective is to minimize the sum of those $c_{uw}$ with $uw \in E \cup F$ for which $u$ and $w$ are in distinct components. For $F = \emptyset$, the problem specializes to the multicut problem, and for $E = \tbinom{V}{2}$ to the clique partitioning problem. We study a binary linear program formulation of the lifted multicut problem. More specifically, we contribute to the analysis of the associated lifted multicut polytopes: Firstly, we establish a necessary, sufficient and efficiently decidable condition for a lower box inequality to define a facet. Secondly, we show that deciding whether a cut inequality of the binary linear program defines a facet is NP-hard.