Related papers: Is submodularity testable?
In this manuscript, we offer a gentle review of submodularity and supermodularity and their properties. We offer a plethora of submodular definitions; a full description of a number of example submodular functions and their generalizations;…
We describe a $\tilde{O}(d^{5/6})$-query monotonicity tester for Boolean functions $f:[n]^d \to \{0,1\}$ on the $n$-hypergrid. This is the first $o(d)$ monotonicity tester with query complexity independent of $n$. Motivated by this…
It has previously been an open problem whether all Boolean submodular functions can be decomposed into a sum of binary submodular functions over a possibly larger set of variables. This problem has been considered within several different…
Submodular optimization is a fundamental problem with many applications in machine learning, often involving decision-making over datasets with sensitive attributes such as gender or age. In such settings, it is often desirable to produce a…
We show that all non-negative submodular functions have high {\em noise-stability}. As a consequence, we obtain a polynomial-time learning algorithm for this class with respect to any product distribution on $\{-1,1\}^n$ (for any constant…
We extend the work of Narasimhan and Bilmes [30] for minimizing set functions representable as a dierence between submodular functions. Similar to [30], our new algorithms are guaranteed to monotonically reduce the objective function at…
A coverage function f over a ground set [m] is associated with a universe U of weighted elements and m subsets A_1,..., A_m of U, and for any subset T of [m], f(T) is defined as the total weight of the elements in the union $\cup_{j\in T}…
We study the problem of ranking with submodular valuations. An instance of this problem consists of a ground set $[m]$, and a collection of $n$ monotone submodular set functions $f^1, \ldots, f^n$, where each $f^i: 2^{[m]} \to R_+$. An…
Over the last two decades, submodular function maximization has been the workhorse of many discrete optimization problems in machine learning applications. Traditionally, the study of submodular functions was based on binary function…
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…
In a nutshell, submodular functions encode an intuitive notion of diminishing returns. As a result, submodularity appears in many important machine learning tasks such as feature selection and data summarization. Although there has been a…
Submodular functions are relevant to machine learning for at least two reasons: (1) some problems may be expressed directly as the optimization of submodular functions and (2) the lovasz extension of submodular functions provides a useful…
In partial function extension, we are given a partial function consisting of $n$ points from a domain and a function value at each point. Our objective is to determine if this partial function can be extended to a function defined on the…
A set function $f$ on a finite set $V$ is submodular if $f(X) + f(Y) \geq f(X \cup Y) + f(X \cap Y)$ for any pair $X, Y \subseteq V$. The symmetric difference transformation (SD-transformation) of $f$ by a canonical set $S \subseteq V$ is a…
We consider submodular function minimization in the oracle model: given black-box access to a submodular set function $f:2^{[n]}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$, find an element of $\arg\min_S \{f(S)\}$ using as few queries to $f(\cdot)$ as…
We consider the problem of testing whether a Boolean function has Fourier degree $\leq k$ or it is $\epsilon$-far from any Boolean function with Fourier degree $\leq k$. We improve the known lower bound of $\Omega(k)$ \cite{BBM11,CGM10}, to…
Submodularity is an important property of set functions and has been extensively studied in the literature. It models set functions that exhibit a diminishing returns property, where the marginal value of adding an element to a set…
Weak submodularity is a natural relaxation of the diminishing return property, which is equivalent to submodularity. Weak submodularity has been used to show that many (monotone) functions that arise in practice can be efficiently maximized…
In many naturally occurring optimization problems one needs to ensure that the definition of the optimization problem lends itself to solutions that are tractable to compute. In cases where exact solutions cannot be computed tractably, it…
We consider non-monotone DR-submodular function maximization, where DR-submodularity (diminishing return submodularity) is an extension of submodularity for functions over the integer lattice based on the concept of the diminishing return…