Related papers: Is submodularity testable?
Submodularity is one of the most well-studied properties of problem classes in combinatorial optimization and many applications of machine learning and data mining, with strong implications for guaranteed optimization. In this thesis, we…
Let f:{-1,1}^n -> R be a real function on the hypercube, given by its discrete Fourier expansion, or, equivalently, represented as a multilinear polynomial. We say that it is Boolean if its image is in {-1,1}. We show that every function on…
Let a Boolean function be available as a black-box (oracle) and one likes to devise an algorithm to test whether it has certain property or it is $\epsilon$-far from having that property. The efficiency of the algorithm is judged by the…
The problem of monotone submodular maximization has been studied extensively due to its wide range of applications. However, there are cases where one can only access the objective function in a distorted or noisy form because of the…
Submodular optimization generalizes many classic problems in combinatorial optimization and has recently found a wide range of applications in machine learning (e.g., feature engineering and active learning). For many large-scale…
In this work, we study the Submodular Cost Submodular Cover problem, which is to minimize the submodular cost required to ensure that the submodular benefit function exceeds a given threshold. Existing approximation ratios for the greedy…
We investigate three related and important problems connected to machine learning: approximating a submodular function everywhere, learning a submodular function (in a PAC-like setting [53]), and constrained minimization of submodular…
Submodular optimization with bandit feedback has recently been studied in a variety of contexts. In a number of real-world applications such as diversified recommender systems and data summarization, the submodular function exhibits…
There has been considerable recent interest in distribution-tests whose run-time and sample requirements are sublinear in the domain-size $k$. We study two of the most important tests under the conditional-sampling model where each query…
$k$-submodular functions, introduced by Huber and Kolmogorov, are functions defined on $\{0, 1, 2, \dots, k\}^n$ satisfying certain submodular-type inequalities. $k$-submodular functions typically arise as relaxations of NP-hard problems,…
Separability of multivariate functions alleviates the difficulty in finding a minimum or maximum value of a function such that an optimal solution can be searched by solving several disjoint problems with lower dimensionalities. In most of…
We introduce the notion of $t$-sum of squares (sos) submodularity, which is a hierarchy, indexed by $t$, of sufficient algebraic conditions for certifying submodularity of set functions. We show that, for fixed $t$, each level of the…
In this work we present the first practical $\left(\frac{1}{e}-\epsilon\right)$-approximation algorithm to maximise a general non-negative submodular function subject to a matroid constraint. Our algorithm is based on combining the…
Constrained submodular function maximization has been used in subset selection problems such as selection of most informative sensor locations. While these models have been quite popular, the solutions Constrained submodular function…
Seminal work by Edmonds and Lovasz shows the strong connection between submodularity and convexity. Submodular functions have tight modular lower bounds, and subdifferentials in a manner akin to convex functions. They also admit poly-time…
Over the last three decades, function testing has been extensively studied over Boolean, finite fields, and discrete settings. However, to encode the real-world applications more succinctly, function testing over the reals (where the domain…
This paper investigates connections between discrete and continuous approaches for decomposable submodular function minimization. We provide improved running time estimates for the state-of-the-art continuous algorithms for the problem…
In this paper we study the problem of minimizing a submodular function $f : 2^V \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ that is guaranteed to have a $k$-sparse minimizer. We give a deterministic algorithm that computes an additive $\epsilon$-approximate…
Submodular function minimization (SFM) is a fundamental discrete optimization problem which generalizes many well known problems, has applications in various fields, and can be solved in polynomial time. Owing to applications in computer…
Subset selection tasks, arise in recommendation systems and search engines and ask to select a subset of items that maximize the value for the user. The values of subsets often display diminishing returns, and hence, submodular functions…