Goodbye 2025, Hello 2026!

The end of 2025 has been very successful for the research group in terms of publications: several of our submitted papers have been accepted by leading journals, including JCTB, Combinatorica, and SIDMA. It has been a challenging period with a lot of hard work, but we are happy to share the good news that, thanks…

Generalizing the Multiple Exchange Property

The multiple exchange property for matroid bases states that for any bases $A$ and $B$ of a matroid and any subset $X\subseteq A\setminus B$, there exists a subset $Y\subseteq B\setminus A$ such that both $A-X+Y$ and $B+X-Y$ are bases. This classical result has not only found applications in matroid theory, but also in the analysis…

Free-order secretary

The Matroid Secretary Problem is a central question in online optimization, modeling sequential decision-making under combinatorial constraints. Despite significant progress, the Matroid Secretary Conjecture — which asks whether every matroid admits a constant-competitive algorithm — remains open. In the paper Free-Order Secretary for Two-Sided Independence Systems, we introduce a bipartite graph framework that unifies and…

Steiner rooted orientations

Finding a Steiner strongly $k$-arc-connected orientation is particularly relevant in network design and reliability, as it guarantees robust communication between a designated set of critical nodes. Király and Lau introduced a rooted variant, called the Steiner Rooted Orientation problem, where one is given an undirected graph on $n$ vertices, a root vertex, and a set…

Principal partition sequences

Narayanan and Fujishige showed the existence of the principal partition sequence of a submodular function, a structure with numerous applications in areas such as clustering, fast algorithms, and approximation algorithms. In our recent paper $\{s,t\}$-Separating Principal Partition Sequence of Submodular Functions, motivated by two applications, we develop a theory of $\{s,t\}$-separating principal partition sequence of…