History-Independent Load Balancing
February 18, 2026 (GHC 8102)
We show that there exists a (strongly) history-independent two-choice balls-and-bins algorithm that supports both insertions and deletions on a set of up to $m$ balls, while guaranteeing a maximum load of $m / n + O(1)$ with high probability, and achieving an expected recourse of $O(\log \log (m/n))$ per operation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first history-independent solution to achieve nontrivial guarantees of any sort for $m/n \ge \omega(1)$, and is the first fully dynamic solution (history independent or not) to achieve $O(1)$ overload with $o(m/n)$ expected recourse.
