A Nearly Quadratic-Time FPTAS for Knapsack

We investigate the classic Knapsack problem and propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) that runs in O(n + (1/)2) time. Prior to our work, the best running time is O(n + (1/)11/5) [Deng, Jin, and Mao’23]. Our algorithm is the best possible (up to a polylogarithmic factor), as Knapsack has no O((n + 1/)2−δ)-time FPTAS for any constant δ > 0, conditioned on the conjecture that (min, +)-convolution has no truly subquadratic-time algorithm.