Related papers: On the Approximation of Submodular Functions
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;…
In this paper we consider parallelization for applications whose objective can be expressed as maximizing a non-monotone submodular function under a cardinality constraint. Our main result is an algorithm whose approximation is arbitrarily…
We consider the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a knapsack constraint. Our main contribution is an algorithm that achieves a nearly-optimal, $1 - 1/e - \epsilon$ approximation, using…
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…
Budget feasible mechanism considers algorithmic mechanism design questions where there is a budget constraint on the total payment of the mechanism. An important question in the field is that under which valuation domains there exist budget…
Classes of set functions along with a choice of ground set are a bedrock to determine and develop corresponding variants of greedy algorithms to obtain efficient solutions for combinatorial optimization problems. The class of approximate…
We present a practical and powerful new framework for both unconstrained and constrained submodular function optimization based on discrete semidifferentials (sub- and super-differentials). The resulting algorithms, which repeatedly compute…
Using polarity, we give an outer polyhedral approximation for the epigraph of set functions. For a submodular function, we prove that the corresponding polar relaxation is exact; hence, it is equivalent to the Lov\'asz extension. The polar…
Suppose some objects are hidden in a finite set $S$ of hiding places which must be examined one-by-one. The cost of searching subsets of $S$ is given by a submodular function and the probability that all objects are contained in a subset is…
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.…
Clustering with submodular functions has been of interest over the last few years. Symmetric submodular functions are of particular interest as minimizing them is significantly more efficient and they include many commonly used functions in…
Submodularity is a key property in discrete optimization. Submodularity has been widely used for analyzing the greedy algorithm to give performance bounds and providing insight into the construction of valid inequalities for mixed-integer…
In this paper we investigate k-submodular functions. This natural family of discrete functions includes submodular and bisubmodular functions as the special cases k = 1 and k = 2 respectively. In particular we generalize the known…
In this work, we consider the maximization of submodular functions constrained by independence systems. Because of the wide applicability of submodular functions, this problem has been extensively studied in the literature, on specialized…
For the problem of maximizing a monotone, submodular function with respect to a cardinality constraint $k$ on a ground set of size $n$, we provide an algorithm that achieves the state-of-the-art in both its empirical performance and its…
We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to…
Recently, it has become evident that submodularity naturally captures widely occurring concepts in machine learning, signal processing and computer vision. Consequently, there is need for efficient optimization procedures for submodular…
We consider the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function under a knapsack constraint. We show that, for any fixed $\epsilon > 0$, there exists a polynomial-time algorithm with an approximation ratio $1-c/e-\epsilon$, where $c…
We study the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular set function subject to linear packing constraints. An instance of this problem consists of a matrix $A \in [0,1]^{m \times n}$, a vector $b \in [1,\infty)^m$, and a monotone…
In this paper, we study the tradeoff between the approximation guarantee and adaptivity for the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a cardinality constraint. The adaptivity of an algorithm is the number of…