Spectral clustering in birthday paradox time
Given a vertex in a (π,π,π)-clusterable graph, i.e. a graph whose vertex set can be partitioned into a disjoint union of π-expanders of size βπ/π with outer conductance bounded by π, can one quickly tell which cluster it belongs to? This is a classical question going back to the expansion testing problem of Goldreich and Ronβ11 (the case of π =2) that has received a lot of attention in the literature. For π =2 a sample of βπ1/2+πβ’(π/π2) logarithmic length walks from a given vertex approximately determines its cluster membership by the birthday paradox: two vertices whose random walk samples are βcloseβ are likely in the same cluster, and otherwise in different clusters. The study of the general case π >2 was initiated by Czumaj, Peng and Sohler [STOCβ15], and the works of Chiplunkar et al. [FOCSβ18], Gluch et al. [SODAβ21] showed that βpolyβ‘(π) β π1/2+πβ’(π/π2) random walk samples, and the same query time, suffices for general π. This matches the π =2 result up to polynomial factors in π, but one notices a conceptual inconsistency: if the birthday paradox is indeed the phenomenon guiding the query complexity here, then the query complexity should decrease, as opposed to increase, with the number of clusters π! Since clusters have size βπ/π, we expect to need β(π/π)1/2+πβ’(π/π2) random walk samples, which gets smaller when π gets larger, and reduces to constant when π βπ. The currently best known query time (of Gluch et al. [SODAβ21]), however, increases with π due to computationally heavy linear-algebraic post-processing of random walk samples. In this paper we design a novel representation of vertices in a (π,π,π)-clusterable graph by a mixture of samples of logarithmic length walks. This representation not only uses the optimal β(π/π)1/2+πβ’(π/π2) number of walks per vertex, but also allows for fast nearest neighbor search: given a collection of π vertices representing the clusters, and a query vertex π₯, we can find the cluster of π₯, using nearly linear time in the representation size of π₯. This gives a spectral clustering oracle with query time β(π/π)1/2+πβ’(π/π2) and space complexity βπ β (π/π)1/2+πβ’(π/π2), matching the birthday paradox bound.
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Kapralov, M., Kochetkova, E., & Wrzos-Kaminska, W. (2026). Spectral clustering in birthday paradox time. In Proceedings of the 2026 Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) (pp. 3057β3071). Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611978971.113
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EPFL
Γcole Polytechnique FΓ©dΓ©rale de Lausanne
2026-01
Philadelphia, PA
9781611978971
3057
3071
REVIEWED
EPFL