Because its binary optimization landscape contains exponentially many local optima, MAX-CUT is highly sensitive to initialization.
We study Particle Polynomial Relaxation (PPR), a moment-based nonconvex continuous reformulation possessing an advantageous optimization landscape.
We warm-start PPR with Combinatorial Multigrid (CMG), a spectral graph-coarsening method that produces structure-aware initial solutions in near-linear time without training data.
On t2g20 ($n=400$), benchmark instance with known exact optimum, the combined CMG+PPR pipeline reaches $97.5\%$ of optimum on average and $98.4\%$ on the best run.
An extended variant with discrete local-search refinement reaches the published optimum on all sixty Biq Mac instances evaluated by a recent neural branch-and-bound method.
Using a sparse CSR representation, the same approach scales to G-set instances with up to $20{,}000$ vertices reducing memory requirements by up to $3333\times$ while maintaining a consistent improvement over the CMG warm start.
Gains are largest on sparse weighted graphs; on dense graphs we complement the pipeline with spectral sparsification.