English

Bounded-Support Additive Latin Transversals via Color-Counted Matching

Data Structures and Algorithms 2026-07-13 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

We consider the following additive Latin transversal problem. Given a multiset A=(a1,,ak)A=(a_1,\dots,a_k) of elements of Zm\mathbb Z_m and a set BZmB\subseteq\mathbb Z_m of cardinality kk, the task is to order BB as b1,,bkb_1,\dots,b_k so that the sums ai+bia_i+b_i are pairwise distinct. When k=mk=m, Hall proved that a solution exists if and only if i=1mai0(modm)\sum_{i=1}^m a_i\equiv 0 \pmod m; moreover, his theorem yields a polynomial-time construction. Alon proved that a solution always exists when mm is prime and k<mk<m, 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 qq is the sum of the target counts and hh is the number of colors, our base-(q+1)(q+1) reduction to Exact Red Matching, combined with the algorithm of Mulmuley-Vazirani-Vazirani, gives a randomized algorithm with running time (V2+E(q+1)h1)O(1)\left(|V|^2+|E|(q+1)^{h-1}\right)^{O(1)} for an input graph (V,E)(V,E). Thus the dependence on the target matching size is qO(h)q^{O(h)}, 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 qO(h2)q^{O(h^2)} dependence for the corresponding fixed-size color-counted instances. Applying this primitive to additive Latin transversals with s=supp(A)s=|\operatorname{supp}(A)|, we obtain an algorithm in randomized time (k+logm)O(s)(k+\log m)^{O(s)}. 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}
}