Towards the proximity conjecture on group-labeled matroids

Consider a matroid M whose ground set is equipped with a labeling to an abelian group. A basis of M is called F-avoiding if the sum of the labels of its elements is not in a forbidden label set F. Hörsch, Imolay, Mizutani, Oki, and Schwarcz (2024) conjectured that if an F-avoiding basis exists, then any basis can be transformed into an F-avoiding basis by exchanging at most |F| elements. This proximity conjecture is known to hold for certain specific groups; in the case where |F| ≤ 2; or when the matroid is subsequence-interchangeably base orderable (SIBO), which is a weakening of the so-called strongly base orderable (SBO) property. In this paper, we settle the proximity conjecture for sparse paving matroids or in the case where |F| ≤ 4. Related to the latter result, we present the first known example of a non-SIBO matroid. We further address the setting of multiple group-label constraints, showing proximity results for the cases of two labelings, SIBO matroids, matroids representable over a fixed, finite field, and sparse paving matroids.