In the classical Maximum Acyclic Subgraph problem (MAS), given a directed-edge weighted graph, we are required to find an ordering of the nodes that maximizes the total weight of forward-directed edges. MAS admits a 2 approximation, and this approximation is optimal under the Unique Game Conjecture. In this paper we consider a generalization of MAS, the Restricted Maximum Acyclic Subgraph problem (RMAS), where each node is associated with a list of integer labels, and we have to find a labeling of the nodes so as to maximize the weight of edges whose head label is larger than the tail label. The best known (almost trivial) approximation for RMAS is 4. The interest of RMAS is mostly due to its connections with the Vertex Pricing problem (VP). In VP we are given an undirected graph with positive edge budgets. A feasible solution consists of an assignment of non-negative prices to the nodes. The profit for each edge @math is the sum of its endpoints prices if that sum is at most the budget of @math , and zero otherwise. Our goal is to maximize the total profit. The best known approximation for VP, which works analogously to the mentioned approximation algorithm for RMAS, is 4. Improving on that is a challenging open problem. On the other hand, the best known 2 inapproximability result is due to a reduction from a special case of RMAS. In this paper we present an improved LP-rounding @math approximation for RMAS. Our result shows that, in order to prove a 4 hardness of approximation result for VP (if possible), one should consider reductions from harder problems. Alternatively, our approach might suggest a different way to design approximation algorithms for VP.
Something more about MAS. How that the 2-apx work? Why does not generalize to RMAS? The intuitive argument is that for MAS the optimum is always at least @math . Our interest in RMAS is motivated by the following problem (VP): we are given an undirected (multi-) graph @math , with positive edge budgets @math . Our goal is to assign a non-negative price @math to each node @math so as to maximize the sum @math over the edges @math such that @math . @cite_10 proved that VP is @math -hard to approximate (under UGC) via a reduction from a special case of RMAS. Their reduction exploits instances of RMAS where labels are non-negative, each @math contains @math , and @math for any distinct @math . Note that such instances still generalize MAS. I meant more details about the reduction to VP. Why do you want to stress the special case of RMAS? The reductions are always special in some sense
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The multiple knapsack problem (MKP) is a natural and well-known generalization of the single knapsack problem and is defined as follows. We are given a set of @math items and @math bins (knapsacks) such that each item @math has a profit @math and a size @math , and each bin @math has a capacity @math . The goal is to find a subset of items of maximum profit such that they have a feasible packing in the bins. MKP is a special case of the generalized assignment problem (GAP) where the profit and the size of an item can vary based on the specific bin that it is assigned to. GAP is APX-hard and a 2-approximation, for it is implicit in the work of Shmoys and Tardos [Math. Program. A, 62 (1993), pp. 461-474], and thus far, this was also the best known approximation for MKP @. The main result of this paper is a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for MKP @. Apart from its inherent theoretical interest as a common generalization of the well-studied knapsack and bin packing problems, it appears to be the strongest special case of GAP that is not APX-hard. We substantiate this by showing that slight generalizations of MKP are APX-hard. Thus our results help demarcate the boundary at which instances of GAP become APX-hard. An interesting aspect of our approach is a PTAS-preserving reduction from an arbitrary instance of MKP to an instance with @math distinct sizes and profits. We consider the following generalization of the binary search problem. A search strategy is required to locate an unknown target node @math in a given tree @math . Upon querying a node @math of the tree, the strategy receives as a reply an indication of the connected component of @math containing the target @math . The cost of querying each node is given by a known non-negative weight function, and the considered objective is to minimize the total query cost for a worst-case choice of the target. Designing an optimal strategy for a weighted tree search instance is known to be strongly NP-hard, in contrast to the unweighted variant of the problem which can be solved optimally in linear time. Here, we show that weighted tree search admits a quasi-polynomial time approximation scheme: for any @math , there exists a @math -approximation strategy with a computation time of @math . Thus, the problem is not APX-hard, unless @math . By applying a generic reduction, we obtain as a corollary that the studied problem admits a polynomial-time @math -approximation. This improves previous @math -approximation approaches, where the @math -notation disregards @math -factors. In this paper we consider the Stochastic Matching problem, which is motivated by applications in kidney exchange and online dating. We are given an undirected graph in which every edge is assigned a probability of existence and a positive profit, and each node is assigned a positive integer called timeout. We know whether an edge exists or not only after probing it. On this random graph we are executing a process, which one-by-one probes the edges and gradually constructs a matching. The process is constrained in two ways: once an edge is taken it cannot be removed from the matching, and the timeout of node @math upper-bounds the number of edges incident to @math that can be probed. The goal is to maximize the expected profit of the constructed matching. For this problem (Algorithmica 2012) provided a @math -approximation algorithm for bipartite graphs, and a @math -approximation for general graphs. In this work we improve the approximation factors to @math and @math , respectively. We also consider an online version of the bipartite case, where one side of the partition arrives node by node, and each time a node @math arrives we have to decide which edges incident to @math we want to probe, and in which order. Here we present a @math -approximation, improving on the @math -approximation of The main technical ingredient in our result is a novel way of probing edges according to a random but non-uniform permutation. Patching this method with an algorithm that works best for large probability edges (plus some additional ideas) leads to our improved approximation factors. par>We prove some non-approximability results for restrictions of basic combinatorial optimization problems to instances of bounded “degreeror bounded “width.” Specifically: We prove that the Max 3SAT problem on instances where each variable occurs in at most B clauses, is hard to approximate to within a factor @math , unless @math . H stad [18] proved that the problem is approximable to within a factor @math in polynomial time, and that is hard to approximate to within a factor @math . Our result uses a new randomized reduction from general instances of Max 3SAT to bounded-occurrences instances. The randomized reduction applies to other Max SNP problems as well. We observe that the Set Cover problem on instances where each set has size at most B is hard to approximate to within a factor @math unless @math . The result follows from an appropriate setting of parameters in Feige's reduction [11]. This is essentially tight in light of the existence of @math -approximate algorithms [20, 23, 9] We present a new PCP construction, based on applying parallel repetition to the inner verifier,'' and we provide a tight analysis for it. Using the new construction, and some modifications to known reductions from PCP to Hitting Set, we prove that Hitting Set with sets of size B is hard to approximate to within a factor @math . The problem can be approximated to within a factor B [19], and it is the Vertex Cover problem for B =2. The relationship between hardness of approximation and set size seems to have not been explored before. We observe that the Independent Set problem on graphs having degree at most B is hard to approximate to within a factor @math , unless P = NP . This follows from a comination of results by Clementi and Trevisan [28] and Reingold, Vadhan and Wigderson [27]. It had been observed that the problem is hard to approximate to within a factor @math unless P = NP [1]. An algorithm achieving factor @math is also known [21, 2, 30, 16 . Let @math be a monotone submodular set function, and let @math be a matroid. We consider the problem @math . It is known that the greedy algorithm yields a @math -approximation [M. L. Fisher, G. L. Nemhauser, and L. A. Wolsey, Math. Programming Stud., no. 8 (1978), pp. 73-87] for this problem. For certain special cases, e.g., @math , the greedy algorithm yields a @math -approximation. It is known that this is optimal both in the value oracle model (where the only access to @math is through a black box returning @math for a given set @math ) [G. L. Nemhauser and L. A. Wolsey, Math. Oper. Res., 3 (1978), pp. 177-188] and for explicitly posed instances assuming @math [U. Feige, J. ACM, 45 (1998), pp. 634-652]. In this paper, we provide a randomized @math -approximation for any monotone submodular function and an arbitrary matroid. The algorithm works in the value oracle model. Our main tools are a variant of the pipage rounding technique of Ageev and Sviridenko [J. Combin. Optim., 8 (2004), pp. 307-328], and a continuous greedy process that may be of independent interest. As a special case, our algorithm implies an optimal approximation for the submodular welfare problem in the value oracle model [J. Vondrak, Proceedings of the @math th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2008, pp. 67-74]. As a second application, we show that the generalized assignment problem (GAP) is also a special case; although the reduction requires @math to be exponential in the original problem size, we are able to achieve a @math -approximation for GAP, simplifying previously known algorithms. Additionally, the reduction enables us to obtain approximation algorithms for variants of GAP with more general constraints. We present a method for solving the shortest transshipmen problem - also known as uncapacitated minimum cost flow - up to a multiplicative error of @math in undirected graphs with polynomially bounded integer edge weights using a tailored gradient descent algorithm. An important special case of the transshipment problem is the single-source shortest paths (SSSP) problem. Our gradient descent algorithm takes @math iterations, and in each iteration it needs to solve the transshipment problem up to a multiplicative error of @math , where @math is the number of nodes. In particular, this allows us to perform a single iteration by computing a solution on a sparse spanner of logarithmic stretch. As a consequence, we improve prior work by obtaining the following results: (1) Broadcast congest model: @math -approximate SSSP using @math rounds, where @math is the (hop) diameter of the network. (2) Broadcast congested clique model: @math -approximate transshipment and SSSP using @math rounds. (3) Multipass streaming model: @math -approximate transshipment and SSSP using @math space and @math passes. The previously fastest algorithms for these models leverage sparse hop sets. We bypass the hop set construction; computing a spanner is sufficient with our method. The above bounds assume non-negative integer edge weights that are polynomially bounded in @math ; for general non-negative weights, running times scale with the logarithm of the maximum ratio between non-zero weights. In case of asymmetric costs, running times scale with the maximum ratio between the costs of both directions over all edges. We study a natural extension of the Maximum Weight Independent Set Problem (MWIS), one of the most studied optimization problems in Graph algorithms. We are given a graph @math , a weight function @math , a budget function @math , and a positive integer @math . The weight (resp. budget) of a subset of vertices is the sum of weights (resp. budgets) of the vertices in the subset. A @math -budgeted independent set in @math is a subset of vertices, such that no pair of vertices in that subset are adjacent, and the budget of the subset is at most @math . The goal is to find a @math -budgeted independent set in @math such that its weight is maximum among all the @math -budgeted independent sets in @math . We refer to this problem as MWBIS. Being a generalization of MWIS, MWBIS also has several applications in Scheduling, Wireless networks and so on. Due to the hardness results implied from MWIS, we study the MWBIS problem in several special classes of graphs. We design exact algorithms for trees, forests, cycle graphs, and interval graphs. In unweighted case we design an approximation algorithm for @math -claw free graphs whose approximation ratio ( @math ) is competitive with the approximation ratio ( @math ) of MWIS (unweighted). Furthermore, we extend Baker's technique Baker83 to get a PTAS for MWBIS in planar graphs. The Euclidean @math -means problem is a classical problem that has been extensively studied in the theoretical computer science, machine learning and the computational geometry communities. In this problem, we are given a set of @math points in Euclidean space @math , and the goal is to choose @math centers in @math so that the sum of squared distances of each point to its nearest center is minimized. The best approximation algorithms for this problem include a polynomial time constant factor approximation for general @math and a @math -approximation which runs in time @math . At the other extreme, the only known computational complexity result for this problem is NP-hardness [ADHP'09]. The main difficulty in obtaining hardness results stems from the Euclidean nature of the problem, and the fact that any point in @math can be a potential center. This gap in understanding left open the intriguing possibility that the problem might admit a PTAS for all @math . In this paper we provide the first hardness of approximation for the Euclidean @math -means problem. Concretely, we show that there exists a constant @math such that it is NP-hard to approximate the @math -means objective to within a factor of @math . We show this via an efficient reduction from the vertex cover problem on triangle-free graphs: given a triangle-free graph, the goal is to choose the fewest number of vertices which are incident on all the edges. Additionally, we give a proof that the current best hardness results for vertex cover can be carried over to triangle-free graphs. To show this we transform @math , a known hard vertex cover instance, by taking a graph product with a suitably chosen graph @math , and showing that the size of the (normalized) maximum independent set is almost exactly preserved in the product graph using a spectral analysis, which might be of independent interest. Given a graph @math and a subset @math of terminals, a of @math is a tree that spans @math . In the vertex-weighted Steiner tree (VST) problem, each vertex is assigned a non-negative weight, and the goal is to compute a minimum weight Steiner tree of @math . We study a natural generalization of the VST problem motivated by multi-level graph construction, the (V-GSST), which can be stated as follows: given a graph @math and terminals @math , where each terminal @math requires a facility of a minimum grade of service @math , compute a Steiner tree @math by installing facilities on a subset of vertices, such that any two vertices requiring a certain grade of service are connected by a path in @math with the minimum grade of service or better. Facilities of higher grade are more costly than facilities of lower grade. Multi-level variants such as this one can be useful in network design problems where vertices may require facilities of varying priority. While similar problems have been studied in the edge-weighted case, they have not been studied as well in the more general vertex-weighted case. We first describe a simple heuristic for the V-GSST problem whose approximation ratio depends on @math , the number of grades of service. We then generalize the greedy algorithm of [Klein & Ravi, 1995] to show that the V-GSST problem admits a @math -approximation, where @math is the set of terminals requiring some facility. This result is surprising, as it shows that the (seemingly harder) multi-grade problem can be approximated as well as the VST problem, and that the approximation ratio does not depend on the number of grades of service. This paper considers the problem of designing maximum distance separable (MDS) codes over small fields with constraints on the support of their generator matrices. For any given @math binary matrix @math , the GM-MDS conjecture, proposed by , states that if @math satisfies the so-called MDS condition, then for any field @math of size @math , there exists an @math MDS code whose generator matrix @math , with entries in @math , fits the matrix @math (i.e., @math is the support matrix of @math ). Despite all the attempts by the coding theory community, this conjecture remains still open in general. It was shown, independently by and , that the GM-MDS conjecture holds if the following conjecture, referred to as the TM-MDS conjecture, holds: if @math satisfies the MDS condition, then the determinant of a transform matrix @math , such that @math fits @math , is not identically zero, where @math is a Vandermonde matrix with distinct parameters. In this work, we first reformulate the TM-MDS conjecture in terms of the Wronskian determinant, and then present an algebraic-combinatorial approach based on polynomial-degree reduction for proving this conjecture. Our proof technique's strength is based primarily on reducing inherent combinatorics in the proof. We demonstrate the strength of our technique by proving the TM-MDS conjecture for the cases where the number of rows ( @math ) of @math is upper bounded by @math . For this class of special cases of @math where the only additional constraint is on @math , only cases with @math were previously proven theoretically, and the previously used proof techniques are not applicable to cases with @math . We propose a fast methodology for encoding graphs with information-theoretically minimum numbers of bits. Specifically, a graph with property @math is called a @math -graph . If @math satisfies certain properties, then an n-node m-edge @math -graph G can be encoded by a binary string X such that (1) G and X can be obtained from each other in O(n log n) time, and (2) X has at most @math bits for any continuous superadditive function @math so that there are at most @math distinct @math -node @math -graphs. The methodology is applicable to general classes of graphs; this paper focuses on planar graphs. Examples of such @math include all conjunctions over the following groups of properties: (1) G is a planar graph or a plane graph; (2) @math is directed or undirected; (3) @math is triangulated, triconnected, biconnected, merely connected, or not required to be connected; (4) the nodes of G are labeled with labels from @math for @math ; (5) the edges of G are labeled with labels from @math for @math ; and (6) each node (respectively, edge) of G has at most @math self-loops (respectively, @math multiple edges). Moreover, @math and @math are not required to be O(1) for the cases of @math being a plane triangulation. These examples are novel applications of small cycle separators of planar graphs and are the only nontrivial classes of graphs, other than rooted trees, with known polynomial-time information-theoretically optimal coding schemes. Given an undirected @math -node unweighted graph @math , a spanner with stretch function @math is a subgraph @math such that, if two nodes are at distance @math in @math , then they are at distance at most @math in @math . Spanners are very well studied in the literature. The typical goal is to construct the sparsest possible spanner for a given stretch function. In this paper we study pairwise spanners, where we require to approximate the @math - @math distance only for pairs @math in a given set @math . Such @math -spanners were studied before [Coppersmith,Elkin'05] only in the special case that @math is the identity function, i.e. distances between relevant pairs must be preserved exactly (a.k.a. pairwise preservers). Here we present pairwise spanners which are at the same time sparser than the best known preservers (on the same @math ) and of the best known spanners (with the same @math ). In more detail, for arbitrary @math , we show that there exists a @math -spanner of size @math with @math . Alternatively, for any @math , there exists a @math -spanner of size @math with @math . We also consider the relevant special case that there is a critical set of nodes @math , and we wish to approximate either the distances within nodes in @math or from nodes in @math to any other node. We show that there exists an @math -spanner of size @math with @math , and an @math -spanner of size @math with @math . All the mentioned pairwise spanners can be constructed in polynomial time. We study undirected networks with edge costs that satisfy the triangle inequality. Let @math denote the number of nodes. We present an @math -approximation algorithm for a generalization of the metric-cost subset @math -node-connectivity problem. Our approximation guarantee is proved via lower bounds that apply to the simple edge-connectivity version of the problem, where the requirements are for edge-disjoint paths rather than for openly node-disjoint paths. A corollary is that, for metric costs and for each @math , there exists a @math -node connected graph whose cost is within a factor of @math of the cost of any simple @math -edge connected graph. Based on our @math -approximation algorithm, we present an @math -approximation algorithm for the metric-cost node-connectivity survivable network design problem, where @math denotes the maximum requirement over all pairs of nodes. Our results contrast with the case of edge costs of 0 or 1, where Kortsarz, Krauthgamer, and Lee. [SIAM J. Comput., 33 (2004), pp. 704-720] recently proved, assuming NP @math DTIME( @math ), a hardness-of-approximation lower bound of @math for the subset @math -node-connectivity problem, where @math denotes a small positive number. In the distributed all-pairs shortest paths problem (APSP), every node in the weighted undirected distributed network (the CONGEST model) needs to know the distance from every other node using least number of communication rounds (typically called time complexity ). The problem admits @math -approximation @math -time algorithm and a nearly-tight @math lower bound [Nanongkai, STOC'14; Lenzen and Patt-Shamir PODC'15] @math , @math and @math hide polylogarithmic factors. Note that the lower bounds also hold even in the unweighted case and in the weighted case with polynomial approximation ratios LenzenP_podc13,HolzerW12,PelegRT12,Nanongkai-STOC14 . . For the exact case, Elkin [STOC'17] presented an @math time bound, which was later improved to @math [Huang, Nanongkai, Saranurak FOCS'17]. It was shown that any super-linear lower bound (in @math ) requires a new technique [Censor-Hillel, Khoury, Paz, DISC'17], but otherwise it remained widely open whether there exists a @math -time algorithm for the exact case, which would match the best possible approximation algorithm. This paper resolves this question positively: we present a randomized (Las Vegas) @math -time algorithm, matching the lower bound up to polylogarithmic factors. Like the previous @math bound, our result works for directed graphs with zero (and even negative) edge weights. In addition to the improved running time, our algorithm works in a more general setting than that required by the previous @math bound; in our setting (i) the communication is only along edge directions (as opposed to bidirectional), and (ii) edge weights are arbitrary (as opposed to integers in 1, 2, ... poly(n) ). ... Given an undirected graph @math with @math edges, @math vertices, and non-negative edge weights, and given an integer @math , we show that for some universal constant @math , a @math -approximate distance oracle for @math of size @math can be constructed in @math time and can answer queries in @math time. We also give an oracle which is faster for smaller @math . Our results break the quadratic preprocessing time bound of Baswana and Kavitha for all @math and improve the @math time bound of Thorup and Zwick except for very sparse graphs and small @math . When @math and @math , our oracle is optimal w.r.t. both stretch, size, preprocessing time, and query time, assuming a widely believed girth conjecture by Erd o s. Given a directed graph @math and a list @math of terminal pairs, the Directed Steiner Network problem asks for a minimum-cost subgraph of @math that contains a directed @math path for every @math . The special case Directed Steiner Tree (when we ask for paths from a root @math to terminals @math ) is known to be fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by the number of terminals, while the special case Strongly Connected Steiner Subgraph (when we ask for a path from every @math to every other @math ) is known to be W[1]-hard. We systematically explore the complexity landscape of directed Steiner problems to fully understand which other special cases are FPT or W[1]-hard. Formally, if @math is a class of directed graphs, then we look at the special case of Directed Steiner Network where the list @math of requests form a directed graph that is a member of @math . Our main result is a complete characterization of the classes @math resulting in fixed-parameter tractable special cases: we show that if every pattern in @math has the combinatorial property of being "transitively equivalent to a bounded-length caterpillar with a bounded number of extra edges," then the problem is FPT, and it is W[1]-hard for every recursively enumerable @math not having this property. This complete dichotomy unifies and generalizes the known results showing that Directed Steiner Tree is FPT [Dreyfus and Wagner, Networks 1971], @math -Root Steiner Tree is FPT for constant @math [Such 'y, WG 2016], Strongly Connected Steiner Subgraph is W[1]-hard [, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 2011], and Directed Steiner Network is solvable in polynomial-time for constant number of terminals [Feldman and Ruhl, SIAM J. Comput. 2006], and moreover reveals a large continent of tractable cases that were not known before. The discrete Gaussian @math is the distribution that assigns to each vector @math in a shifted lattice @math probability proportional to @math . It has long been an important tool in the study of lattices. More recently, algorithms for discrete Gaussian sampling (DGS) have found many applications in computer science. In particular, polynomial-time algorithms for DGS with very high parameters @math have found many uses in cryptography and in reductions between lattice problems. And, in the past year, Aggarwal, Dadush, Regev, and Stephens-Davidowitz showed @math -time algorithms for DGS with a much wider range of parameters and used them to obtain the current fastest known algorithms for the two most important lattice problems, the Shortest Vector Problem (SVP) and the Closest Vector Problem (CVP). Motivated by its increasing importance, we investigate the complexity of DGS itself and its relationship to CVP and SVP. Our first result is a polynomial-time dimension-preserving reduction from DGS to CVP. There is a simple reduction from CVP to DGS, so this shows that DGS is equivalent to CVP. Our second result, which we find to be more surprising, is a polynomial-time dimension-preserving reduction from centered DGS (the important special case when @math ) to SVP. In the other direction, there is a simple reduction from @math -approximate SVP for any @math , and we present some (relatively weak) evidence to suggest that this might be the best achievable approximation factor. We also show that our CVP result extends to a much wider class of distributions and even to other norms. In this work we show that for every @math , such that for all @math where the parameters of the model do not depend on @math . They also provide a rare example where one can prove a polynomial time mixing of Gibbs sampler in a situation where the actual mixing time is slower than @math . Our proof exploits in novel ways the local treelike structure of Erd o s-R 'enyi random graphs, comparison and block dynamics arguments and a recent result of Weitz. Our results extend to much more general families of graphs which are sparse in some average sense and to much more general interactions. In particular, they apply to any graph for which every vertex @math of the graph has a neighborhood @math of radius @math in which the induced sub-graph is a tree union at most @math edges and where for each simple path in @math the sum of the vertex degrees along the path is @math . Moreover, our result apply also in the case of arbitrary external fields and provide the first FPRAS for sampling the Ising distribution in this case. We finally present a non Markov Chain algorithm for sampling the distribution which is effective for a wider range of parameters. In particular, for @math it applies for all external fields and @math , where @math is the critical point for decay of correlation for the Ising model on @math . We investigate nonparametric multiproduct pricing problems, in which we want to find revenue maximizing prices for products @math based on a set of customer samples @math . We mostly focus on the unit-demand case, in which products constitute strict substitutes and each customer aims to purchase a single product. In this setting a customer sample consists of a number of nonzero values for different products and possibly an additional product ranking. Once prices are fixed, each customer chooses to buy one of the products she can afford based on some predefined selection rule. We distinguish between the min-buying, max-buying, and rank-buying models. Some of our results also extend to single-minded pricing, in which case products are strict complements and every customer seeks to buy a single set of products, which she purchases if the sum of prices is below her valuation for that set. For the min-buying model we show that the revenue maximization problem is not approximable within factor @math for some constant @math , unless @math , thereby almost closing the gap between the known algorithmic results and previous lower bounds. We also prove inapproximability within @math , @math being an upper bound on the number of nonzero values per customer, and @math under slightly stronger assumptions and provide matching upper bounds. Surprisingly, these hardness results hold even if a price ladder constraint, i.e., a predefined order on the prices of all products, is given. Without the price ladder constraint we obtain similar hardness results for the special case of uniform valuations, i.e., the case that every customer has identical values for all the products she is interested in, assuming specific hardness of the balanced bipartite independent set problem in constant degree graphs or hardness of refuting random 3CNF formulas. Introducing a slightly more general problem definition in which customers are given as an explicit probability distribution, we obtain inapproximability within @math assuming @math . These results apply to single-minded pricing as well. For the max-buying model a polynomial-time approximation scheme exists if a price ladder is given. We give a matching lower bound by proving strong NP-hardness. Assuming limited product supply, we analyze a generic local search algorithm and prove that it is 2-approximate. Finally, we discuss implications for the rank-buying model. Given a high-dimensional data matrix @math , Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithms construct sequences of vectors @math , @math , indexed by @math by iteratively applying @math or @math , and suitable non-linear functions, which depend on the specific application. Special instances of this approach have been developed --among other applications-- for compressed sensing reconstruction, robust regression, Bayesian estimation, low-rank matrix recovery, phase retrieval, and community detection in graphs. For certain classes of random matrices @math , AMP admits an asymptotically exact description in the high-dimensional limit @math , which goes under the name of state evolution.' Earlier work established state evolution for separable non-linearities (under certain regularity conditions). Nevertheless, empirical work demonstrated several important applications that require non-separable functions. In this paper we generalize state evolution to Lipschitz continuous non-separable nonlinearities, for Gaussian matrices @math . Our proof makes use of Bolthausen's conditioning technique along with several approximation arguments. In particular, we introduce a modified algorithm (called LAMP for Long AMP) which is of independent interest.