English

Tight constructions for reconfigurations of independent transversals

Combinatorics 2026-04-24 v1

Abstract

For a graph GG and partition U\mathcal{U} of its vertex set, an independent transversal of (G,U)(G, \mathcal{U}) is an independent set of GG that contains one vertex from each block of U\mathcal{U}. Buys, Kang, and Ozeki studied when a reconfiguration graph on independent transversals of (G,U)(G,\mathcal{U}) is connected, meaning any independent transversal can be transformed into any other one through a sequence of one-vertex modifications while always maintaining an independent transversal. Analogous to a theorem of Haxell, they proved that this is the case if GG has maximum degree Δ\Delta and each block of U\mathcal{U} has size at least 2Δ2\Delta, except if the union of some k1k \ge 1 blocks of U\mathcal{U} induces kk disjoint copies of the complete bipartite graph KΔ,ΔK_{\Delta, \Delta} in GG. Solving one of their problems, we exactly characterize the partition structure in the latter exceptional instances of their theorem, showing that there is a rich variety of them but they are generated by a simple constructive procedure.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.21576,
  title  = {Tight constructions for reconfigurations of independent transversals},
  author = {Ronen Wdowinski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21576},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, 4 figures