Community-Aware Network Dismantling via Gateways: Large-Scale Evaluation on LFR Benchmarks

Network dismantling—the targeted removal of nodes to degrade large-scale connectivity—plays a central role in resilience analysis, epidemic containment, and systemic-risk mitigation. Recent work shows that dismantling performance depends strongly on mesoscale modular structure, suggesting that community-aware strategies may offer advantages over classical centrality-based heuristics. In this work, we perform a large-scale, systematic evaluation of dismantling strategies and introduce gateways as a new mesoscale dismantling concept. While similar experiments exist using degree- and betweenness-based dismantling strategies, we check a new strategy based on gateways, which capture asymmetric entry points into communities and generalize the notion of inter-community connectors. Furthermore, we process a massive dataset of 568,584 LFR benchmark graphs, covering a wide range of degree distributions, community sizes, and mixing parameters. For evaluation, we use both extrinsic (ARI, NMI, FMI, VI) and intrinsic (Modularity, Coverage, Performance, Average Conductance, Average Internal Density) metrics. We find that across parameter regimes and evaluation metrics, classical strategies (degree, betweenness, community connections) and gateway-based dismantling exhibit broadly similar performance. Our results also corroborate recent findings that dismantling effectiveness is robust to the specific partitioning algorithm and that inter-community connectivity plays a dominant role in global fragmentation. The evaluation provides large-scale evidence that gateway-aware dismantling captures an operationally relevant mesoscale mechanism as good as previous approaches and motivates further empirical studies on real networks and cost-aware settings.