Faster High Accuracy Multi-Commodity Flow from Single-Commodity Techniques

Abstract: Since the development of efficient linear program solvers in the 80s, all major improvements for solving multi-commodity flows to high accuracy came from improvements to general linear program solvers. This differs from the single commodity problem (e.g.~maximum flow) where all recent improvements also rely on graph specific techniques such as graph decompositions or the Laplacian paradigm (see e.g.~[CMSV17,KLS20,BLL+21,CKL+22]). This phenomenon sparked research to understand why these graph techniques are unlikely to help for multi-commodity flow. [Kyng, Zhang'20] reduced solving multi-commodity Laplacians to general linear systems and [Ding, Kyng, Zhang'22] showed that general linear programs can be reduced to 2-commodity flow. However, the reductions create sparse graph instances, so improvement to multi-commodity flows on denser graphs might exist. We show that one can indeed speed up multi-commodity flow algorithms on non-sparse graphs using graph techniques from single-commodity flow algorithms. This is the first improvement to high accuracy multi-commodity flow algorithms that does not just stem from improvements to general linear program solvers. In particular, using graph data structures from recent min-cost flow algorithm by [BLL+21] based on the celebrated expander decomposition framework, we show that 2-commodity flow on an $n$-vertex $m$-edge graph can be solved in $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{m}n<sup>{\omega-1/2})$ time for current bounds on fast matrix multiplication $\omega \approx 2.373$, improving upon the previous fastest algorithms with $\tilde{O}(m<sup>\omega)$ [CLS19] and $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{m}n<sup>2)$ [KV96] time complexity. For general $k$ commodities, our algorithm runs in $\tilde{O}(k<sup>{2.5}\sqrt{m}n<sup>{\omega-1/2})$ time.