Majority Dynamics on Assortative Sparse Stochastic Block Models

2026-07-27Discrete Mathematics

Discrete MathematicsInformation Theory
AI summary

The authors study how opinions spread in a network where connections between people change over time, depending on their current opinions. They focus on a model where people with the same opinion are more likely to connect than those with different opinions, and analyze how long it takes for everyone to share the same opinion (called unanimity). They find that a specific weighted measure of the opinion groups, not just their size difference, determines the speed of consensus. Their results describe three different time scales for consensus depending on this weighted advantage and provide detailed mathematical estimates for opinion changes.

Majority dynamicsStochastic block modelAssortative regimeSparse graphOpinion dynamicsUnanimity timeWeighted advantageRandom graphBinomial differencesOne-vertex flip probability
Authors
Ioana Dumitriu, Muchen Ju, Hai-Xiao Wang
Abstract
Majority dynamics is a two-opinion process in which each vertex repeatedly updates to the majority opinion among its neighbors. We study this process on a resampled sparse binary stochastic block model in the assortative regime. At each time step, a graph is sampled from the current opinion partition: vertices with the same opinion are joined with probability $α=a\log N/N$, while vertices with differing opinions are joined with probability $β=b\log N/N$, where $a>b>1$. Let $B_t$ and $R_t$ denote the blue and red camps at time $t$. We show that the weighted advantage $\widetildeΔ_t =b|B_t|-a|R_t|$, rather than the unweighted advantage $Δ_t=|B_t|-|R_t|$ alone, governs the pace to unanimity. Our results, which hold with high probability as \(N\to\infty\), identify three regimes for blue unanimity under the initial blue advantage, i.e., $Δ_0>0$: constant time, subpolynomial time, and polynomial time. First, when $\widetildeΔ_0 \gtrsim -N/\sqrt{\log N}$, blue unanimity occurs within three updates. Second, when $\widetildeΔ_0 < 0$ and $|\widetildeΔ_0| = o(N)$, blue unanimity occurs within $N^{o(1)}$ updates. Furthermore, when $\widetildeΔ_0 < 0$, $|\widetildeΔ_0| = O(N)$, and $Δ_0\gg\sqrt{N/\log N}$, blue unanimity still occurs within $N^{I_0+o(1)}$ updates, where \[ I_0= \left(\mathbf{ReLU}\Big(\sqrt{a\frac{|R_0|}{N}}-\sqrt{b\frac{|B_0|}{N}}\Big)\right)^2, \] and $\mathbf{ReLU}(x)=\max\{x,0\}$. Conversely, away from the weighted threshold, when $|B_0|/|R_0|\le a/b-κ$ and $Δ_0>0$, $N^{I_0 - o(1)}$ updates are necessary for blue unanimity. Our analysis relies on detailed estimates for one-vertex flip probabilities in sparse binomial differences, which could be of independent interest.