A discrepancy dichotomy for 1-factorizations of signed complete bipartite graphs
Abstract
Given a signing of the complete bipartite graph, when does admit a -factorization in which every perfect matching has discrepancy bounded below by a positive absolute constant? Unlike the complete-graph case resolved by Ai, He, Im, and Lee, the bipartite setting carries an unavoidable obstruction: any balanced one-sided signing -- one whose edge signs depend on a single bipartition class, with the two labels split as evenly as possible -- forces every perfect matching to have discrepancy at most . We prove that this is essentially the only obstruction: For every there exists such that, for all sufficiently large , every signing of either (i) admits a -factorization in which every perfect matching has discrepancy at least , or (ii) is -close, in normalized Hamming distance, to a balanced one-sided signing. A key ingredient is a spectral stability argument forcing the sign matrix to be close to a balanced one-sided pattern when both the overall discrepancy and the density of local switching patterns are small.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.25444,
title = {A discrepancy dichotomy for 1-factorizations of signed complete bipartite graphs},
author = {Yisai Xue and Yacong Zhou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.25444},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
16 pages, 2 figures