Tight Lower Bounds for Weighted Matroid Problems

In this paper we derive tight lower bounds resolving the hardness status of several fundamental weighted matroid problems. One notable example is budgeted matroid independent set, for which we show there is no fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS), indicating the Efficient PTAS of [Doron-Arad, Kulik and Shachnai, SOSA 2023] is the best possible. Furthermore, we show that there is no pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for exact weight matroid independent set, implying the algorithm of [Camerini, Galbiati and Maffioli, J. Algorithms 1992] for representable matroids cannot be generalized to arbitrary matroids. Similarly, we show there is no Fully PTAS for constrained minimum basis of a matroid and knapsack cover with a matroid, implying the existing Efficient PTAS for the former is optimal. For all of the above problems, we obtain unconditional lower bounds in the oracle model, where the independent sets of the matroid can be accessed only via a membership oracle. We complement these results by showing that the same lower bounds hold under standard complexity assumptions, even if the matroid is encoded as part of the instance. All of our bounds are based on a specifically structured family of paving matroids.