Consider a high-multiplicity Bin Packing instance $I$ with $d$ distinct item types. In 2014, Goemans and Rothvoss gave an algorithm with runtime ${{|I|}^2}^{O(d)}$ for this problem~[SODA'14], where $|I|$ denotes the encoding length of the instance $I$. Although Jansen and Klein~[SODA'17] later developed an algorithm that improves upon this runtime in a special case, it has remained a major open problem by Goemans and Rothvoss~[J.ACM'20] whether the doubly exponential dependency on $d$ is necessary. We solve this open problem by showing that unless the ETH fails, there is no algorithm solving the high-multiplicity Bin Packing problem in time ${{|I|}^2}^{o(d)}$. To prove this, we introduce a novel reduction from 3-SAT. The core of our construction is efficiently encoding all information from a 3-SAT instance with $n$ variables into an ILP with $O(\log(n))$ variables and constraints. This result confirms that the Goemans and Rothvoss algorithm is essentially best-possible for Bin Packing parameterized by the number $d$ of item sizes in the context of XP time algorithms.
翻译:考虑一个具有 $d$ 种不同物品类型的高重数装箱问题实例 $I$。2014年,Goemans 和 Rothvoss 针对该问题给出了一个运行时间为 ${{|I|}^2}^{O(d)}$ 的算法~[SODA'14],其中 $|I|$ 表示实例 $I$ 的编码长度。尽管 Jansen 和 Klein~[SODA'17] 后来开发了一种算法,在特殊情况下改进了此运行时间,但关于对 $d$ 的双指数依赖是否必要的问题,始终是 Goemans 和 Rothvoss~[J.ACM'20] 提出的一个主要开放性问题。我们通过证明除非指数时间假设(ETH)不成立,否则不存在能在时间 ${{|I|}^2}^{o(d)}$ 内求解高重数装箱问题的算法,从而解决了这一开放性问题。为证明这一点,我们引入了一种新颖的从 3-SAT 问题的归约。我们构造的核心是将一个具有 $n$ 个变量的 3-SAT 实例的所有信息高效编码为一个具有 $O(\log(n))$ 个变量和约束的整数线性规划(ILP)。这一结果证实,在以物品尺寸数量 $d$ 为参数的 XP 时间算法背景下,Goemans 和 Rothvoss 的算法对于装箱问题本质上是不可改进的。