Network dismantling is one of the most challenging problems in complex systems. This problem encompasses a broad array of practical applications. Previous works mainly focus on the metrics such as the number of nodes in the Giant Connected Component (GCC), average pairwise connectivity, etc. This paper introduces a novel metric, the accumulated 2-core size, for assessing network dismantling. Due to the NP-hard computational complexity of this problem, we propose SmartCore, an end-to-end model for minimizing the accumulated 2-core size by leveraging reinforcement learning and graph neural networks. Extensive experiments across synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate SmartCore’s superiority over existing methods in terms of both accuracy and speed, suggesting that SmartCore should be a better choice for the network dismantling problem in practice.

Tackling the intricacies of network dismantling in complex systems poses significant challenges. This task has relevance across various practical domains, yet traditional approaches focus primarily on singular metrics, such as the number of nodes in the Giant Connected Component (GCC) or the average pairwise connectivity. In contrast, we propose a unique metric that concurrently targets nodes with the highest degree and reduces the GCC size. Given the NP-hard nature of optimizing this metric, we introduce MaxShot, an innovative end-to-end solution that leverages graph representation learning and reinforcement learning. Through comprehensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets, our method consistently outperforms leading benchmarks in accuracy and efficiency. These results highlight MaxShot’s potential as a superior approach to effectively addressing the network dismantling problem.

Tackling the intricacies of network dismantling in complex systems poses significant challenges. This task has relevance across various practical domains, yet traditional approaches focus primarily on singular metrics, such as the number of nodes in the Giant Connected Component (GCC) or average pairwise connectivity. In contrast, we propose a unique metric that concurrently targets nodes with the highest degree and reduces the GCC size. Given the NP-hard nature of optimizing this metric, we introduce MaxShot, an innovative end-to-end solution that leverages graph representation learning and reinforcement learning. Through comprehensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets, our method consistently outperforms leading benchmarks in accuracy and efficiency. These results highlight MaxShot’s potential as a superior approach to address the network dismantling problem effectively.