Faster Matroid Partition Algorithms

In the matroid partitioning problem, we are given $k$ matroids $\mathcal{M}_1 = (V, \mathcal{I}_1), \dots , \mathcal{M}_k = (V, \mathcal{I}_k)$ defined over a common ground set $V$ of $n$ elements, and we need to find a partitionable set $S \subseteq V$ of largest possible cardinality, denoted by $p$. Here, a set $S \subseteq V$ is called partitionable if there exists a partition $(S_1, \dots , S_k)$ of $S$ with $S_i \in \mathcal{I}_i$ for $i = 1, \ldots, k$. In 1986, Cunningham presented a matroid partition algorithm that uses $O(n p^{3/2} + k n)$ independence oracle queries, which was the previously known best algorithm. This query complexity is $O(n^{5/2})$ when $k \leq n$. Our main result is to present a matroid partition algorithm that uses $\tilde{O}(k^{1/3} n p + k n)$ independence oracle queries, which is $\tilde{O}(n^{7/3})$ when $k \leq n$. This improves upon previous Cunningham's algorithm. To obtain this, we present a new approach \emph{edge recycling augmentation}, which can be attained through new ideas: an efficient utilization of the binary search technique by Nguyen and Chakrabarty-Lee-Sidford-Singla-Wong and a careful analysis of the number of independence oracle queries. Our analysis differs significantly from the one for matroid intersection algorithms, because of the parameter $k$. We also present a matroid partition algorithm that uses $\tilde{O}((n + k) \sqrt{p})$ rank oracle queries.