Related papers: Minimizing a sum of submodular functions
Submodular continuous functions are a category of (generally) non-convex/non-concave functions with a wide spectrum of applications. We characterize these functions and demonstrate that they can be maximized efficiently with approximation…
We study the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular set function subject to linear packing constraints. An instance of this problem consists of a matrix $A \in [0,1]^{m \times n}$, a vector $b \in [1,\infty)^m$, and a monotone…
Finding diverse solutions to optimization problems has been of practical interest for several decades, and recently enjoyed increasing attention in research. While submodular optimization has been rigorously studied in many fields, its…
Many large-scale machine learning problems--clustering, non-parametric learning, kernel machines, etc.--require selecting a small yet representative subset from a large dataset. Such problems can often be reduced to maximizing a submodular…
We develop a framework for the distributed minimization of submodular functions. Submodular functions are a discrete analog of convex functions and are extensively used in large-scale combinatorial optimization problems. While there has…
The task of maximizing a monotone submodular function under a cardinality constraint is at the core of many machine learning and data mining applications, including data summarization, sparse regression and coverage problems. We study this…
Let $N$ be a finite set of cardinality $n$, and $a\in N$. A submodular function $f$ on $N$ with $f(a)=1$ is defined to be $a$-reduced if, for any decomposition $f=g+h$ into submodular functions where $h$ does not depend on $a$, it follows…
We design new approximation algorithms for the problems of optimizing submodular and supermodular functions subject to a single matroid constraint. Specifically, we consider the case in which we wish to maximize a nondecreasing submodular…
Many tasks in machine learning and data mining, such as data diversification, non-parametric learning, kernel machines, clustering etc., require extracting a small but representative summary from a massive dataset. Often, such problems can…
Marginalization -- summing a function over all assignments to a subset of its inputs -- is a fundamental computational problem with applications from probabilistic inference to formal verification. Despite its computational hardness in…
In this work, we propose a novel optimization model termed "sum-of-minimum" optimization. This model seeks to minimize the sum or average of $N$ objective functions over $k$ parameters, where each objective takes the minimum value of a…
Symmetric submodular function minimization admits purely combinatorial algorithms using special orderings of the ground set. Extending the minimum-cut algorithm of Nagamochi and Ibaraki (1992), Queyranne (1998) showed that the maximum…
The sheer scale of modern datasets has resulted in a dire need for summarization techniques that identify representative elements in a dataset. Fortunately, the vast majority of data summarization tasks satisfy an intuitive diminishing…
This article presents a discussion of optimization problems where the objective function f(x) has parameters that are constrained by some scaling, so that q(x) = constant, where this function q() involves a sum of the parameters, their…
Many combinatorial problems arising in machine learning can be reduced to the problem of minimizing a submodular function. Submodular functions are a natural discrete analog of convex functions, and can be minimized in strongly polynomial…
Continuous submodular functions are a category of generally non-convex/non-concave functions with a wide spectrum of applications. The celebrated property of this class of functions - continuous submodularity - enables both exact…
This paper studies the computational complexity of a robust variant of a two-stage submodular minimization problem that we call Robust Submodular Minimizer. In this problem, we are given $k$ submodular functions~$f_1,\dots,f_k$ over a set…
Most of existing studies on submodular maximization focus on selecting a subset of items that maximizes a \emph{single} submodular function. However, in many real-world scenarios, we might have multiple user-specific functions, each of…
We provide a generic technique for constructing families of submodular functions to obtain lower bounds for submodular function minimization (SFM). Applying this technique, we prove that any deterministic SFM algorithm on a ground set of…
We study the recently introduced idea of worst-case sensitivity for monotone submodular maximization with cardinality constraint $k$, which captures the degree to which the output argument changes on deletion of an element in the input. We…