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arXiv · 2610.03588

Faster Sublinear Maximal Independent Set Size

Peter Kiss·Arash Kooroshnezhad
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Abstract

We give a sublinear-time algorithm for estimating the size of a maximal independent set in a graph using adjacency-query access with expected running time $\tilde{O}(n^{1+1/3})$, improving over the previous $\tilde{O}(n^{1+1/2})$ bound of Mahadabi et al. [MRTV26]. As a consequence of a reduction of [MRTV26], this also improves the running time for sublinear metric Steiner forest. We further show that a bi-criteria estimate of the $k$-center objective in general metrics can be obtained via a reduction to maximal independent set size estimation.

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Peter Kiss, Arash Kooroshnezhad. 2026-10-02. Faster Sublinear Maximal Independent Set Size. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03588

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