English
Related papers

Related papers: Submodular Functions: Learnability, Structure, and…

200 papers

We consider the minimization of submodular functions subject to ordering constraints. We show that this optimization problem can be cast as a convex optimization problem on a space of uni-dimensional measures, with ordering constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-31 Francis Bach

We consider the problem of maximizing a non-monotone DR-submodular function subject to a cardinality constraint. Diminishing returns (DR) submodularity is a generalization of the diminishing returns property for functions defined over the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-09-05 Ali Khodabakhsh , Evdokia Nikolova

We consider a class of sparsity-inducing regularization terms based on submodular functions. While previous work has focused on non-decreasing functions, we explore symmetric submodular functions and their \lova extensions. We show that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-13 Francis Bach

For multi-valued functions---such as when the conditional distribution on targets given the inputs is multi-modal---standard regression approaches are not always desirable because they provide the conditional mean. Modal regression…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-30 Yangchen Pan , Ehsan Imani , Martha White , Amir-massoud Farahmand

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Rishabh Iyer , Jeff A. Bilmes

The study of mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse-engineer a model to explain its behaviors. While recent studies have focused on the static mechanism of a certain behavior, the learning dynamics inside a model remain to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Yueyan Li , Wenhao Gao , Caixia Yuan , Xiaojie Wang

We introduce a method to learn a mixture of submodular "shells" in a large-margin setting. A submodular shell is an abstract submodular function that can be instantiated with a ground set and a set of parameters to produce a submodular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Hui Lin , Jeff A. Bilmes

A supervised learning algorithm searches over a set of functions $A \to B$ parametrised by a space $P$ to find the best approximation to some ideal function $f\colon A \to B$. It does this by taking examples $(a,f(a)) \in A\times B$, and…

Category Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-02 Brendan Fong , David I. Spivak , Rémy Tuyéras

DR-submodular continuous functions are important objectives with wide real-world applications spanning MAP inference in determinantal point processes (DPPs), and mean-field inference for probabilistic submodular models, amongst others.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-27 An Bian , Kfir Y. Levy , Andreas Krause , Joachim M. Buhmann

Maximizing submodular functions under cardinality constraints lies at the core of numerous data mining and machine learning applications, including data diversification, data summarization, and coverage problems. In this work, we study this…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-11-01 Alessandro Epasto , Silvio Lattanzi , Sergei Vassilvitskii , Morteza Zadimoghaddam

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-04-03 Vitaly Feldman , Pravesh Kothari , Jan Vondrak

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…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-09-09 Rishabh Iyer , Jeff Bilmes

Submodular functions -- functions exhibiting diminishing returns -- are central to machine learning. When the objective is monotone and non-negative, the greedy algorithm achieves a tight $63\%$ approximation. But many practical objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yixin Chen , Alan Kuhnle

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…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2009-09-09 Stanislav Zivny , David A. Cohen , Peter G. Jeavons

Minimizing a sum of simple submodular functions of limited support is a special case of general submodular function minimization that has seen numerous applications in machine learning. We develop fast techniques for instances where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Nate Veldt , Austin R. Benson , Jon Kleinberg

Maximizing monotone submodular functions under a matroid constraint is a classic algorithmic problem with multiple applications in data mining and machine learning. We study this classic problem in the fully dynamic setting, where elements…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Paul Dütting , Federico Fusco , Silvio Lattanzi , Ashkan Norouzi-Fard , Morteza Zadimoghaddam

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Matthew Fahrbach , Vahab Mirrokni , Morteza Zadimoghaddam

To illustrate that the notion of convergence of submodular function sequences fits reasonably into the limit theory of graphs, we describe several classes of matroids and other submodular setfunctions for which convergence of appropriate…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-07-22 Kristóf Bérczi , Márton Borbényi , László Lovász , László Márton Tóth

Distributionally robust optimization is used to tackle decision making problems under uncertainty where the distribution of the uncertain data is ambiguous. Many ambiguity sets have been proposed for continuous uncertainty that build on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-28 Karthik Natarajan , Divya Padmanabhan , Arjun Ramachandra

Deep learning has arguably achieved tremendous success in recent years. In simple words, deep learning uses the composition of many nonlinear functions to model the complex dependency between input features and labels. While neural networks…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-04-16 Jianqing Fan , Cong Ma , Yiqiao Zhong