Bounded-Support Additive Latin Transversals via Color-Counted Matching
Abstract
We consider the following additive Latin transversal problem. Given a multiset of elements of and a set of cardinality , the task is to order as so that the sums are pairwise distinct. When , Hall proved that a solution exists if and only if ; moreover, his theorem yields a polynomial-time construction. Alon proved that a solution always exists when is prime and , but no polynomial-time construction is known in general. Our main algorithmic contribution is a direct randomized algorithm for Color-Counted Matching: given an edge-colored graph and prescribed target counts for the colors, find a matching using exactly the prescribed number of edges of each color. If is the sum of the target counts and is the number of colors, our base- reduction to Exact Red Matching, combined with the algorithm of Mulmuley-Vazirani-Vazirani, gives a randomized algorithm with running time for an input graph . Thus the dependence on the target matching size is , up to polynomial factors in the graph size. In contrast, applying the general matching-ILP theorem of Lassota and Ligthart as a black box yields a dependence for the corresponding fixed-size color-counted instances. Applying this primitive to additive Latin transversals with , we obtain an algorithm in randomized time . In particular, additive Latin transversals are randomized polynomial-time constructible for every fixed support size.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.11241,
title = {Bounded-Support Additive Latin Transversals via Color-Counted Matching},
author = {Antoine Deza and Yan Gerard and Yijun Ma and Sebastian Pokutta},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.11241},
year = {2026}
}