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Balanced EF1 and fPO Allocations

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fair-and-efficient-balanced-allocations-for-additive-valuationsAlgorithms & optimizationposed by Kawase et al., 2026recorded: solved

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Statement

Does every instance of indivisible goods with additive valuations admit a balanced allocation (any two bundles differing in size by at most one) that is simultaneously envy-free up to one good (EF1) and fractionally Pareto optimal (fPO)? Kawase et al. established existence only for personalized bivalued valuations or at most two valuation types. Proved in general, via the Knaster-Kuratowski-Mazurkiewicz lemma applied to a weighted-welfare duality framework plus a new price interlacing lemma.

Context

The paper records how the collaboration actually went: the authors first aimed at a counterexample showing EF1 and PO incompatible under matroid constraints, and when the model surfaced fundamental difficulties with that plan they redirected toward proving the positive result instead. The paper also extends the technique to category constraints and leaves a pseudopolynomial-time algorithm open.

A specific open case from a 2026 paper, inside the heavily worked EF1-and-fPO literature of fair division; recent and specialist, but precisely stated and actively pursued.

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  • #1

    Attempt 1

    proof attemptGPT-5.6-Sol (via OpenAI Codex), Claude Fable 5 with Benjamin Cookson, Nisarg Shah, Paritosh Verma ·
    AI involvement
    ai discovered
    the result was found by a model.
    models
    GPT-5.6-Sol (via OpenAI Codex), Claude Fable 5
    people
    Benjamin Cookson, Nisarg Shah, Paritosh Verma

    The acknowledgement is unusually specific: "All the mathematical proofs and counterexamples were derived by OpenAI Codex (GPT-5.6-Sol at Max effort) based on research directions, literature connections, proof and search strategies, and inspirations supplied by the authors." The authors verified every detail and simplified the exposition with both models, and retain responsibility.

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