Related papers: Maximizing General Set Functions by Submodular Dec…

Submodular functions have applications throughout machine learning, but in many settings, we do not have direct access to the underlying function $f$. We focus on stochastic functions that are given as an expectation of functions over a…

DR-submodular continuous functions are important objectives with wide real-world applications spanning MAP inference in determinantal point processes (DPPs), and mean-field inference for probabilistic submodular models, amongst others.…

In this paper we investigate k-submodular functions. This natural family of discrete functions includes submodular and bisubmodular functions as the special cases k = 1 and k = 2 respectively. In particular we generalize the known…

We extend the work of Narasimhan and Bilmes [30] for minimizing set functions representable as a difference between submodular functions. Similar to [30], our new algorithms are guaranteed to monotonically reduce the objective function at…

Motivated by a wide range of applications in data mining and machine learning, we consider the problem of maximizing a submodular function subject to supermodular cost constraints. In contrast to the well-understood setting of cardinality…

Submodular functions are a broad class of set functions, which naturally arise in diverse areas. Many algorithms have been suggested for the maximization of these functions. Unfortunately, once the function deviates from submodularity, the…

We develop a decomposition method based on the augmented Lagrangian framework to solve a broad family of semidefinite programming problems, possibly with nonlinear objective functions, nonsmooth regularization, and general linear…

Let us assume that $f$ is a continuous function defined on the unit ball of $\mathbb R^d$, of the form $f(x) = g (A x)$, where $A$ is a $k \times d$ matrix and $g$ is a function of $k$ variables for $k \ll d$. We are given a budget $m \in…

Let F be a finite set of graphs. In the F-Deletion problem, we are given an n-vertex graph G and an integer k as input, and asked whether at most k vertices can be deleted from G such that the resulting graph does not contain a graph from F…

Let $G$ be a group. A function $G\rightarrow G$ of the form $x\mapsto x^{\alpha}g$ for a fixed automorphism $\alpha$ of $G$ and a fixed $g\in G$ is called an affine map of $G$. In this paper, we study finite groups $G$ with an affine map of…

In monotone submodular function maximization, approximation guarantees based on the curvature of the objective function have been extensively studied in the literature. However, the notion of curvature is often pessimistic, and we rarely…

Functional decomposition is the process of breaking down a function $f$ into a composition $f=g(f_1,\dots,f_k)$ of simpler functions $f_1,\dots,f_k$ belonging to some class $\mathcal{F}$. This fundamental notion can be used to model…

We study the minimization of a convex function $f(X)$ over the set of $n\times n$ positive semi-definite matrices, but when the problem is recast as $\min_U g(U) := f(UU^\top)$, with $U \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times r}$ and $r \leq n$. We study…

We study the canonical problem of maximizing a stochastic submodular function subject to a cardinality constraint, where the goal is to select a subset from a ground set of items with uncertain individual performances to maximize their…

We investigate robust optimization problems defined for maximizing convex functions. For finite uncertainty set, we develop a geometric branch-and-bound algorithmic approach to solve this problem. The geometric branch-and-bound algorithm…

In this paper, we consider the optimization problem Submodular Cover (SCP), which is to find a minimum cardinality subset of a finite universe $U$ such that the value of a submodular function $f$ is above an input threshold $\tau$. In…

We study a variant of the \emph{generalized assignment problem} ({\sf GAP}) with group constraints. An instance of {\sf Group GAP} is a set $I$ of items, partitioned into $L$ groups, and a set of $m$ uniform (unit-sized) bins. Each item $i…

We study two variants of \textsc{Maximum Cut}, which we call \textsc{Connected Maximum Cut} and \textsc{Maximum Minimal Cut}, in this paper. In these problems, given an unweighted graph, the goal is to compute a maximum cut satisfying some…

We consider the problem of maximizing a non-monotone DR-submodular function subject to a cardinality constraint. Diminishing returns (DR) submodularity is a generalization of the diminishing returns property for functions defined over the…

We study the problem of minimizing or maximizing the average value $ f(S)/|S| $ of a submodular or supermodular set function $ f: 2^V \to \mathbb{R} $ over non-empty subsets $ S \subseteq V $. This generalizes classical problems such as…