- Research Article
- 10.1145/3743670
Vertex Connectivity in Poly-logarithmic Max-Flows
- Jul 25, 2025
- Journal of the ACM
- Jason Li + 4 more +4
The vertex connectivity of an m -edge n -vertex undirected graph is the smallest number of vertices whose removal disconnects the graph or leaves only a singleton vertex. In 1974, Aho Hopcroft and Ullman asked if vertex connectivity can be computed in linear time. Despite the substantial effort in the past five decades, the best-known running time is \(\tilde{O}(mn)\) by Henzinger-Rao-Gabow (FOCS 1996). Indeed, no algorithm with an o ( mn ) running time is known even if we assume a linear-time max-flow algorithm. In this article, we give an affirmative answer to this long-standing open problem (up to a sub-polynomial factor). We present a randomized reduction from the vertex connectivity problem to the max-flow problem which incurs only a poly-logarithmic overhead in runtime. Using this reduction, we can solve vertex connectivity in almost linear time by using the celebrated almost-linear-time max-flow algorithms by Chen-Kyng-Liu-Peng-Probst Gutenberg-Sachdeva (FOCS 2022) and Brand-Chen-Kyng-Liu-Peng-Probst Gutenberg-Sachdeva-Sidford (FOCS 2023). Using our new techniques, we also obtain an algorithm for directed vertex connectivity with a running time of n 2 + o (1) time which improves the best-known bound of \(\tilde{O}(mn)\) by Henzinger-Rao-Gabow (FOCS 1996).
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