White's Conjecture for Paving Matroids

Abstract

White's conjecture asserts that any two tuples of matroid bases that have the same multi-set union can be transformed from one to another by symmetric exchanges; it also implies that the toric ideals of matroids are generated by the binomials encoding these exchanges. We prove White's conjecture for the class of paving matroids. Our strategy is to generalize the inductive argument using circuit-hyperplane relaxations in the recent work of Han et al. to stressed hyperplane relaxations.