Neural Acceleration for Graph Partitioning
For practitioners needing scalable graph partitioning, this offers a faster alternative to spectral methods, though the improvement is incremental.
Graph partitioning is accelerated by replacing costly eigenvalue computation with a neural network that approximates the Fiedler vector, achieving comparable quality with reduced computational overhead for large-scale problems.
Graph Partitioning is a critical problem in numerous scientific and engineering domains including social network analysis, VLSI design, and many more. Spectral methods are known to produce quality partitions while minimizing edge cuts for a wide range of problems. However, the computational cost associated with the calculation of the Fiedler vector, an eigenvector associated with the second smallest eigenvalue of the graph Laplacian, remains a significant bottleneck due to memory issues and computational costs. In this paper, we present an accelerated approach to spectral bisection partitioning by replacing the traditional eigenvalue calculation with a simple artificial neural network model to approximate the Fiedler vector. We demonstrate that our approach achieves partitioning quality comparable to spectral bisection while significantly reducing the computational overhead, making it more scalable and efficient for large-scale problems