Symmetry and approximability of submodular maximization problems

A number of recent results on optimization problems involving submodular functions have made use of the multilinear relaxation of the problem. These results hold typically in the value oracle model, where the objective function is accessible via a black box returning f(S) for a given S. We present a general approach to deriving inapproximability results in the value oracle model, based on the notion of symmetry gap. Our main result is that for any fixed instance that exhibits a certain symmetry gap in its multilinear relaxation, there is a naturally related class of instances for which a better approximation factor than the symmetry gap would require exponentially many oracle queries. This unifies several known hardness results for submodular maximization, and implies several new ones. In particular, we prove that there is no constant-factor approximation for the problem of maximizing a non-negative submodular function over the bases of a matroid. We also provide a closely matching approximation algorithm for this problem.