Related papers: Convex Analysis and Optimization with Submodular F…

This note deals with certain properties of convex functions. We provide results on the convexity of the set of minima of these functions, the behaviour of their subgradient set under restriction, and optimization of these functions over an…

Elementary facts and observations on the cone of supermodular set functions are recalled. The manuscript deals with such operations with set functions which preserve supermodularity and the emphasis is put on those such operations which…

Submodular function minimization is a fundamental optimization problem that arises in several applications in machine learning and computer vision. The problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time, but general purpose algorithms have…

This paper considers the problem of smoothing convex functions and sets, seeking the nearest smooth convex function or set to a given one. For convex cones and sublinear functions, a full characterization of the set of all optimal…

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…

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…

Integrally convex functions constitute a fundamental function class in discrete convex analysis, including M-convex functions, L-convex functions, and many others. This paper aims at a rather comprehensive survey of recent results on…

In this note we provide a full conjugacy and subdifferential calculus for convex convex-composite functions in finite-dimensional space. Our approach, based on infimal convolution and cone-convexity, is straightforward and yields the…

Optimization problems, generalized equations, and the multitude of other variational problems invariably lead to the analysis of sets and set-valued mappings as well as their approximations. We review the central concept of set-convergence…

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…

A new directional derivative and a new subdifferential for set-valued convex functions are constructed, and a set-valued version of the so-called 'max-formula' is proven. The new concepts are used to characterize solutions of convex…

A natural connection between rational functions of several real or complex variables, and subspace collections is explored. A new class of function, superfunctions, are introduced which are the counterpart to functions at the level of…

We develop a framework for the distributed minimization of submodular functions. Submodular functions are a discrete analog of convex functions and are extensively used in large-scale combinatorial optimization problems. While there has…

It is established that general s-convex functions are a new class of generalized convex functions. In a similar vein, a new class of general s-convex sets is introduced, which are generalizations of s-convex sets. Additionally, certain…

Many combinatorial problems arising in machine learning can be reduced to the problem of minimizing a submodular function. Submodular functions are a natural discrete analog of convex functions, and can be minimized in strongly polynomial…

Integrating functions on discrete domains into neural networks is key to developing their capability to reason about discrete objects. But, discrete domains are (1) not naturally amenable to gradient-based optimization, and (2) incompatible…

Convex sets appear in various mathematical theories, and are used to define notions such as convex functions and hulls. As an abstraction from the usual definition of convex sets in vector spaces, we formalize in Coq an intrinsic…

Discrete convex functions are used in many areas, including operations research, discrete-event systems, game theory, and economics. The objective of this paper is to investigate basic operations such as direct sum, splitting, and…

Over the past years a theory of conjugate duality for set-valued functions that map into the set of upper closed subsets of a preordered topological vector space was developed. For scalar duality theory, continuity of convex functions plays…

Submodular continuous functions are a category of (generally) non-convex/non-concave functions with a wide spectrum of applications. We characterize these functions and demonstrate that they can be maximized efficiently with approximation…