Related papers: Is submodularity testable?

We study the complexity of approximate representation and learning of submodular functions over the uniform distribution on the Boolean hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$. Our main result is the following structural theorem: any submodular function is…

Maximization of {\it non-submodular} functions appears in various scenarios, and many previous works studied it based on some measures that quantify the closeness to being submodular. On the other hand, many practical non-submodular…

Notions of ordinal submodularity/supermodularity have been introduced and studied in the literature. We consider several classes of ordinally submodular functions defined on finite Boolean lattices and give characterizations of the set of…

Submodular optimization finds applications in machine learning and data mining. In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing functions of the form $h = f-c$, where $f$ is a monotone, non-negative, weakly submodular set function and $c$…

Submodular set-functions have many applications in combinatorial optimization, as they can be minimized and approximately maximized in polynomial time. A key element in many of the algorithms and analyses is the possibility of extending the…

Maximizing a single submodular set function subject to a cardinality constraint is a well-studied and central topic in combinatorial optimization. However, finding a set that maximizes multiple functions at the same time is much less…

Submodular functions describe a variety of discrete problems in machine learning, signal processing, and computer vision. However, minimizing submodular functions poses a number of algorithmic challenges. Recent work introduced an…

The problem of maximizing non-negative monotone submodular functions under a certain constraint has been intensively studied in the last decade. In this paper, we address the problem for functions defined over the integer lattice. Suppose…

Recently, Deshpande et al. introduced a new measure of the complexity of a Boolean function. We call this measure the "goal value" of the function. The goal value of $f$ is defined in terms of a monotone, submodular utility function…

In this paper, we investigate a class of submodular problems which in general are very hard. These include minimizing a submodular cost function under combinatorial constraints, which include cuts, matchings, paths, etc., optimizing a…

We demonstrate the usefulness of submodularity in statistics as a characterization of the difficulty of the \emph{search} problem of feature selection. The search problem is the ability of a procedure to identify an informative set of…

We present a practical and powerful new framework for both unconstrained and constrained submodular function optimization based on discrete semidifferentials (sub- and super-differentials). The resulting algorithms, which repeatedly compute…

Let $(L; \sqcap, \sqcup)$ be a finite lattice and let $n$ be a positive integer. A function $f : L^n \to \mathbb{R}$ is said to be submodular if $f(\tup{a} \sqcap \tup{b}) + f(\tup{a} \sqcup \tup{b}) \leq f(\tup{a}) + f(\tup{b})$ for all…

We investigate two new optimization problems -- minimizing a submodular function subject to a submodular lower bound constraint (submodular cover) and maximizing a submodular function subject to a submodular upper bound constraint…

Submodular function optimization has numerous applications in machine learning and data analysis, including data summarization which aims to identify a concise and diverse set of data points from a large dataset. It is important to…

Submodular function minimization is a key problem in a wide variety of applications in machine learning, economics, game theory, computer vision, and many others. The general solver has a complexity of $O(n^3 \log^2 n . E +n^4 {\log}^{O(1)}…

It is generally believed that submodular functions -- and the more general class of $\gamma$-weakly submodular functions -- may only be optimized under the non-negativity assumption $f(S) \geq 0$. In this paper, we show that once the…

Submodular Functions are a special class of set functions, which generalize several information-theoretic quantities such as entropy and mutual information [1]. Submodular functions have subgradients and subdifferentials [2] and admit…

Recently, it has become evident that submodularity naturally captures widely occurring concepts in machine learning, signal processing and computer vision. Consequently, there is need for efficient optimization procedures for submodular…

Symmetric submodular functions are an important family of submodular functions capturing many interesting cases including cut functions of graphs and hypergraphs. Maximization of such functions subject to various constraints receives little…