Latent Geometry-Driven Network Automata for Complex Network Dismantling

Complex networks model the structure and function of critical technological, biological, and communication systems. Network dismantling, the targeted removal of nodes to fragment a network, is essential for analyzing and improving system robustness. Existing dismantling methods suffer from key limitations: they depend on global structural knowledge, exhibit slow running times on large networks, and overlook the network’s latent geometry, a key feature known to govern the dynamics of complex systems. Motivated by these findings, we introduce Latent Geometry-Driven Network Automata (LGD-NA), a novel framework that leverages local network automata rules to approximate effective link distances between interacting nodes. LGD-NA is able to identify critical nodes and capture latent manifold information of a network for effective and efficient dismantling. We show that this latent geometry-driven approach outperforms all existing dismantling algorithms, including spectral Laplacian-based methods and machine learning ones such as graph neural networks and . We also find that a simple common-neighbor-based network automata rule achieves near state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the effectiveness of minimal local information for dismantling. LGD-NA is extensively validated on the largest and most diverse collection of real-world networks to date (1,475 real-world networks across 32 complex systems domains) and scales efficiently to large networks via GPU acceleration. Finally, we leverage the explainability of our common-neighbor approach to engineer network robustness, substantially increasing the resilience of real-world networks. We validate LGD-NA's practical utility on domain-specific functional metrics, spanning neuronal firing rates in the Drosophila Connectome, transport efficiency in flight maps, outbreak sizes in contact networks, and communication pathways in terrorist cells. Our results confirm latent geometry as a fundamental principle for understanding the robustness of real-world systems, adding dismantling to the growing set of processes that network geometry can explain.