Related papers: Is submodularity testable?
We show that for any constant $\epsilon > 0$ and $p \ge 1$, it is possible to distinguish functions $f : \{0,1\}^n \to [0,1]$ that are submodular from those that are $\epsilon$-far from every submodular function in $\ell_p$ distance with a…
We study the problem of maximizing a function that is approximately submodular under a cardinality constraint. Approximate submodularity implicitly appears in a wide range of applications as in many cases errors in evaluation of a…
Submodularity is a fundamental phenomenon in combinatorial optimization. Submodular functions occur in a variety of combinatorial settings such as coverage problems, cut problems, welfare maximization, and many more. Therefore, a lot of…
A real-valued set function is (additively) approximately submodular if it satisfies the submodularity conditions with an additive error. Approximate submodularity arises in many settings, especially in machine learning, where the function…
Submodular functions are discrete functions that model laws of diminishing returns and enjoy numerous algorithmic applications. They have been used in many areas, including combinatorial optimization, machine learning, and economics. In…
Several recent works [DHLNSY25, CPPS25a, CPPS25b] have studied a model of property testing of Boolean functions under a \emph{relative-error} criterion. In this model, the distance from a target function $f: \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ that is…
In this paper we provide improved running times and oracle complexities for approximately minimizing a submodular function. Our main result is a randomized algorithm, which given any submodular function defined on $n$-elements with range…
Submodular function minimization is well studied, and existing algorithms solve it exactly or up to arbitrary accuracy. However, in many applications, such as structured sparse learning or batch Bayesian optimization, the objective function…
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…
Submodularity is a discrete domain functional property that can be interpreted as mimicking the role of the well-known convexity/concavity properties in the continuous domain. Submodular functions exhibit strong structure that lead to…
We consider the problem of testing whether an unknown Boolean function $f$ is monotone versus $\epsilon$-far from every monotone function. The two main results of this paper are a new lower bound and a new algorithm for this well-studied…
We consider the problem of maximizing non-negative non-decreasing set functions. Although most of the recent work focus on exploiting submodularity, it turns out that several objectives we encounter in practice are not submodular.…
Submodular maximization is a general optimization problem with a wide range of applications in machine learning (e.g., active learning, clustering, and feature selection). In large-scale optimization, the parallel running time of an…
Submodular functions are a special class of set functions which naturally model the notion of representativeness, diversity, coverage etc. and have been shown to be computationally very efficient. A lot of past work has applied submodular…
The scalability of submodular optimization methods is critical for their usability in practice. In this paper, we study the reducibility of submodular functions, a property that enables us to reduce the solution space of submodular…
The relative-error property testing model was introduced in [CDHLNSY24] to facilitate the study of property testing for "sparse" Boolean-valued functions, i.e. ones for which only a small fraction of all input assignments satisfy the…
Submodular functions are a fundamental object of study in combinatorial optimization, economics, machine learning, etc. and exhibit a rich combinatorial structure. Many subclasses of submodular functions have also been well studied and…
We consider the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function under noise. There has been a great deal of work on optimization of submodular functions under various constraints, resulting in algorithms that provide desirable…
A Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n \mapsto \{0,1\}$ is said to be $\eps$-far from monotone if $f$ needs to be modified in at least $\eps$-fraction of the points to make it monotone. We design a randomized tester that is given oracle access to…
Submodularity is a key property in discrete optimization. Submodularity has been widely used for analyzing the greedy algorithm to give performance bounds and providing insight into the construction of valid inequalities for mixed-integer…