Related papers: On the Approximation of Submodular Functions

We study the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function with viability constraints. This problem originates from computational biology, where we are given a phylogenetic tree over a set of species and a directed graph, the…

Submodular functions are at the core of many machine learning and data mining tasks. The underlying submodular functions for many of these tasks are decomposable, i.e., they are sum of several simple submodular functions. In many data…

We study the problem of maximizing constrained non-monotone submodular functions and provide approximation algorithms that improve existing algorithms in terms of either the approximation factor or simplicity. Our algorithms combine…

In this paper we provide improved running times and oracle complexities for approximately minimizing a submodular function. Our main result is a randomized algorithm, which given any submodular function defined on $n$-elements with range…

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 functions are set functions mapping every subset of some ground set of size $n$ into the real numbers and satisfying the diminishing returns property. Submodular minimization is an important field in discrete optimization theory…

This paper presents a polynomial-time $1/2$-approximation algorithm for maximizing nonnegative $k$-submodular functions. This improves upon the previous $\max\{1/3, 1/(1+a)\}$-approximation by Ward and \v{Z}ivn\'y~(SODA'14), where…

In this work we give two new algorithms that use similar techniques for (non-monotone) submodular function maximization subject to a cardinality constraint. The first is an offline fixed parameter tractable algorithm that guarantees a…

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…

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…

We consider the problem of maximizing non-negative non-decreasing set functions. Although most of the recent work focus on exploiting submodularity, it turns out that several objectives we encounter in practice are not submodular.…

Continuous submodular functions are a category of generally non-convex/non-concave functions with a wide spectrum of applications. The celebrated property of this class of functions - continuous submodularity - enables both exact…

Set-functions appear in many areas of computer science and applied mathematics, such as machine learning, computer vision, operations research or electrical networks. Among these set-functions, submodular functions play an important role,…

Set functions with convenient properties (such as submodularity) appear in application areas of current interest, such as algorithmic game theory, and allow for improved optimization algorithms. It is natural to ask (e.g., in the context of…

We consider the problem of minimising functions represented as a difference of lattice submodular functions. We propose analogues to the SupSub, SubSup and ModMod routines for lattice submodular functions. We show that our…

In machine learning and big data, the optimization objectives based on set-cover, entropy, diversity, influence, feature selection, etc. are commonly modeled as submodular functions. Submodular (function) maximization is generally NP-hard,…

We consider active, semi-supervised learning in an offline transductive setting. We show that a previously proposed error bound for active learning on undirected weighted graphs can be generalized by replacing graph cut with an arbitrary…

We study algorithms for the Submodular Multiway Partition problem (SubMP). An instance of SubMP consists of a finite ground set $V$, a subset of $k$ elements $S = \{s_1,s_2,...,s_k\}$ called terminals, and a non-negative submodular set…

We design new approximation algorithms for the problems of optimizing submodular and supermodular functions subject to a single matroid constraint. Specifically, we consider the case in which we wish to maximize a nondecreasing submodular…

We introduce the concept of quotient-convergence for sequences of submodular set functions, providing, among others, a new framework for the study of convergence of matroids through their rank functions. Extending the limit theory of…