Title: Latent Geometry-Driven Network Automata for Complex Network Dismantling
Primary area: learning on graphs and other geometries & topologies
Keywords: network robustness, network dismantling, network geometry, network science, complex systems, network automata, graphs, network topology

Abstract: 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 machine learning methods such as graph neural networks. 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. 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.

TL;DR: Latent Geometry-Driven Network Automata dismantles networks by estimating effective link distances on the latent manifold via local rules, outperforming all existing methods on 1,475 real-world networks and runs efficiently on large systems via GPU.