,
Björn Schumacher
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
In the Knapsack problem, one is given the task of packing a knapsack of a given size with items in order to gain a packing with a high profit value. As one of the most classical problems in computer science, research for this problem has gone a long way. One important connection to the (max,+)-convolution problem has been established, where knapsack solutions can be combined by building the convolution of two sequences. This observation has been used in recent years to give conditional lower bounds but also parameterized algorithms.
In this paper we carry these results into higher dimensions. We consider Knapsack where items are characterized by multiple properties - given through a vector - and a knapsack that has a capacity vector. The packing must not exceed any of the given capacity constraints. In order to show a similar sub-quadratic lower bound we consider a multidimensional version of (max, +)-convolution. We then consider variants of this problem introduced by Cygan et al. and prove that they are all equivalent in terms of algorithms that allow for a running time sub-quadratic in the number of entries of the array.
We further develop a parameterized algorithm to solve higher dimensional Knapsack. The techniques we apply are inspired by an algorithm introduced by Axiotis and Tzamos. We will show that even for higher dimensional Knapsack, we can reduce the problem to convolution on one-dimensional, concave sequences, leading to an 𝒪(dn + dD ⋅ max{(Π_{i=1}^d t_i), t_max log t_max}) algorithm, where D is the number of different weight vectors, t the capacity vector and d is the dimension of the problem. Then, we use the techniques to improve the approach of Eisenbrand and Weismantel to obtain an algorithm for Integer Linear Programming with upper bounds with running time 𝒪(dn) + D ⋅ 𝒪(d Δ)^{d(d+1)} + T_LP.
Finally, we give an divide-and-conquer algorithm for ILP with running time n^{d+1} ⋅ O(Δ)^d ⋅ log(|u - 𝓁|_∞).
@InProceedings{grage_et_al:LIPIcs.WADS.2025.30,
author = {Grage, Kilian and Jansen, Klaus and Schumacher, Bj\"{o}rn},
title = {{Convolution and Knapsack in Higher Dimensions}},
booktitle = {19th International Symposium on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS 2025)},
pages = {30:1--30:16},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-398-0},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2025},
volume = {349},
editor = {Morin, Pat and Oh, Eunjin},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.WADS.2025.30},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-242618},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.WADS.2025.30},
annote = {Keywords: Knapsack, Convolution, Integer Linear Programming}
}