English

A discrepancy dichotomy for 1-factorizations of signed complete bipartite graphs

Combinatorics 2026-05-26 v1

Abstract

Given a signing σ ⁣:E(Kn,n){1,+1}\sigma\colon E(K_{n,n})\to\{-1,+1\} of the complete bipartite graph, when does Kn,nK_{n,n} admit a 11-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 1/n1/n. We prove that this is essentially the only obstruction: For every ε>0\varepsilon>0 there exists c=c(ε)>0c=c(\varepsilon)>0 such that, for all sufficiently large nn, every signing of Kn,nK_{n,n} either (i) admits a 11-factorization in which every perfect matching has discrepancy at least cc, or (ii) is ε\varepsilon-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

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:31:50.353Z