WWW2026

Network Dismantling via Reverse Dismantling: Static and Dynamic Algorithms

Jinyu Duan, Sijin Wang, Fan Zhang, Xiang Zhao, Wenjie Zhang, Zhihong Tian

Abstract

For complex networks such as the Web, the Network Dismantling (ND) problem, which asks for the minimum-cost removal of nodes that destroys the giant connected component in the network, is significant in system robustness and misinformation containment. In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm, IG+, which is based on reverse dismantling and incorporates novel optimizations. Besides, we design two dynamic algorithms, CCRT-ins and CCRT-rem, employing tree-like indexes to update dismantling results efficiently. Experiments show that our methods outperform state-of-the-art approaches in both effectiveness and efficiency, and can dismantle 10-million-scale networks at arbitrary granularity in a few minutes.