Fast Cycle Canceling Algorithms for Minimum Cost Submodular Flow*

This paper presents two fast cycle canceling algorithms for the submodular flow problem. The first uses an assignment problem whose optimal solution identifies most negative node-disjoint cycles in an auxiliary network. Canceling these cycles lexicographically makes it possible to obtain an optimal submodular flow in O(n4h log(nC)) time, which almost matches the current fastest weakly polynomial time for submodular flow (where n is the number of nodes, h is the time for computing an exchange capacity, and C is the maximum absolute value of arc costs). The second algorithm generalizes Goldberg’s cycle canceling algorithm for min cost flow to submodular flow to also get a running time of O(n4h log(nC)).. We show how to modify these algorithms to make them strongly polynomial, with running times of O(n6h log n), which matches the fastest strongly polynomial time bound for submodular flow. We also show how to extend both algorithms to solve submodular flow with separable convex objectives.

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