ICLR2026

Nearly Space-Optimal Graph and Hypergraph Sparsification in Insertion-Only Data Streams

Vincent Cohen-Addad, David Woodruff, Shenghao Xie, Samson Zhou

1 citation

Abstract

We study the problem of graph and hypergraph sparsification in insertion-only data streams. The input is a hypergraph H=(V,E,w)H=(V, E, w) with nn nodes, mm hyperedges, and rank rr, and the goal is to compute a hypergraph H^\widehat{H} that preserves the energy of each vector xRnx \in \mathbb{R}^n in HH, up to a small multiplicative error. In this paper, we give a streaming algorithm that achieves a (1+ε)(1+\varepsilon)-approximation, using O(rnε2log2nlogr)\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{rn}{\varepsilon^2} \log^2 n \log r\right) \cdot poly (loglogm)(\log \log m) bits of space, matching the sample complexity of the best known offline algorithm up to poly (loglogm)(\log \log m) factors. Our approach also provides a streaming algorithm for graph sparsification that achieves a (1+ε)(1+\varepsilon)-approximation, using O(nε2logn)poly(loglogn)\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{n}{\varepsilon^2} \log n\right)\cdot\text{poly}(\log\log n) bits of space, improving the current bound by logn\log n factors. Furthermore, we give a space-efficient streaming algorithm for min-cut approximation. Along the way, we present an online algorithm for (1+ε)(1+\varepsilon)-hypergraph sparsification, which is optimal up to poly-logarithmic factors. Hence, we achieve (1+ε)(1+\varepsilon)-hypergraph sparsification in the sliding window model, with space optimal up to poly-logarithmic factors. Lastly, we give an adversarially robust algorithm for hypergraph sparsification using nε2\frac{n}{\varepsilon^2} \cdot poly (r,logn,logr,loglogm)(r, \log n, \log r, \log \log m) bits of space.