Solving (k-1)-stable instances of k-terminal cut with isolating cuts

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The k-terminal cut problem, also known as the multiterminal cut problem, is defined on an edge-weighted graph with k distinct vertices called “terminals.” The goal is to remove a minimum weight collection of edges from the graph such that there is no path between any pair of terminals. The problem is APX-hard. Isolating cuts are minimum cuts which separate one terminal from the rest. The union of all the isolating cuts, except the largest, is a (2-2/k)-approximation to the optimal k-terminal cut. An instance of k-terminal cut is gamma -stable if edges in the cut can be multiplied by up to gamma without changing the unique optimal solution. In this paper, we show that, in any (k-1)-stable instance of k-terminal cut, the source sets of the isolating cuts are the source sets of the unique optimal solution to that k-terminal cut instance. We conclude that the (2-2/k)-approximation algorithm returns the optimal solution on (k-1)-stable instances. Ours is the first result showing that this (2-2/k)-approximation is an exact optimization algorithm on a special class of graphs. We also show that our (k-1)-stability result is tight. We construct (k-1-epsilon )-stable instances of the k-terminal cut problem which only have trivial isolating cuts: that is, the source set of the isolating cuts for each terminal is just the terminal itself. Thus, the (2-2/k)-approximation does not return an optimal solution.