Space Complexity of Minimum Cut Problems in Single-Pass Streams

We consider the problem of finding a minimum cut of a weighted graph presented as a single-pass stream. While graph sparsification in streams has been intensively studied, the specific application of finding minimum cuts in streams is less well-studied. To this end, we show upper and lower bounds on minimum cut problems in insertion-only streams for a variety of settings, including for both randomized and deterministic algorithms, for both arbitrary and random order streams, and for both approximate and exact algorithms. One of our main results is an \(\widetilde{O}(n/\epsilon)\) space algorithm with fast update time for approximating a spectral cut query with high probability on a stream given in an arbitrary order. Our result breaks the \(\Omega(n/\epsilon^2)\) space lower bound required of a sparsifier that approximates all cuts simultaneously. Using this result, we provide streaming algorithms with near optimal space of \(\widetilde{O}(n/\epsilon)\) for minimum cut and approximate all-pairs effective resistances, with matching space lower-bounds. The amortized update time of our algorithms is \(\widetilde{O}(1)\), provided that the number of edges in the input graph is at least \((n/\epsilon^2)^{1+o(1)}\). We also give a generic way of incorporating sketching into a recursive contraction algorithm to improve the post-processing time of our algorithms. In addition to these results, we give a random-order streaming algorithm that computes the {\it exact} minimum cut on a simple, unweighted graph using \(\widetilde{O}(n)\) space. Finally, we give an \(\Omega(n/\epsilon^2)\) space lower bound for deterministic minimum cut algorithms which matches the best-known upper bound up to polylogarithmic factors.

Matthew Ding, Alexandro Garces, Jason Li, Honghao Lin, Jelani Nelson, Vihan Shah, and David P. Woodruff. Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS 2025).
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