Another amazing result by Jason Li: an almost linear-time algorithm for maximum flows on capacitated directed graphs, avoiding the interior-point approach behind many of the recent max-flow results. arxiv.org/abs/2608.17384
Maximum Flow Without the Outer IPM arxiv.org
AI Weekly's analysis
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- Jason Li and Alex Wice describe an m^{1+o(1)}-time maximum flow algorithm that avoids the interior-point method framework used by recent almost-linear-time results.
- The construction hinges on the balancing weights technique of Li (2026) producing an approximate pseudo-circulation of a directed, capacitated graph directly.
- The reference points named in the abstract are Chen et al. (FOCS 2022) and van den Brand et al. (FOCS 2024).
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16d ago
The [BNW22] approach uses scaling on the lengths. Then Jeremy Fineman's STOC 2024 paper gave an algorithm for real edge weights with sub-O(mn) runtime, using hop-limited shortest paths, betweenness reductions, and the delicious-but-spicy negative sandwiches. arxiv.org/pdf/2311…
arxiv.org
This follows close on the heels of work by Jason and Isaac Hair, George Li, and Junkai Zhang, which shows an almost-linear time algorithm for the "Bellman-Ford" problem: shortest paths in graphs with arbitrary real weights. arxiv.org/abs/2607.19346 (3/n)
Bellman-Ford in Almost-Linear Time arxiv.org