An Improved FPTAS for 0-1 Knapsack

The 0-1 knapsack problem is an important NP-hard problem that admits fully polynomial-time approximation schemes (FPTASs). Previously the fastest FPTAS by Chan (2018) with approximation factor $1+\varepsilon$ runs in $\tilde O(n + (1/\varepsilon)^{12/5})$ time, where $\tilde O$ hides polylogarithmic factors. In this paper we present an improved algorithm in $\tilde O(n+(1/\varepsilon)^{9/4})$ time, with only a $(1/\varepsilon)^{1/4}$ gap from the quadratic conditional lower bound based on $(\min,+)$-convolution. Our improvement comes from a multi-level extension of Chan's number-theoretic construction, and a greedy lemma that reduces unnecessary computation spent on cheap items.

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