English

Improved Inapproximability For Submodular Maximization

Computational Complexity 2010-04-22 v1

Abstract

We show that it is Unique Games-hard to approximate the maximum of a submodular function to within a factor 0.695, and that it is Unique Games-hard to approximate the maximum of a symmetric submodular function to within a factor 0.739. These results slightly improve previous results by Feige, Mirrokni and Vondr\'ak (FOCS 2007) who showed that these problems are NP-hard to approximate to within 3/4+ϵ0.7503/4 + \epsilon \approx 0.750 and 5/6+ϵ0.8335/6 + \epsilon \approx 0.833, respectively.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1004.3777,
  title  = {Improved Inapproximability For Submodular Maximization},
  author = {Per Austrin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1004.3777},
  year   = {2010}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:13:15.437Z