Related papers: Polyhedral aspects of Submodularity, Convexity and…
Submodular Functions are a special class of set functions, which generalize several information-theoretic quantities such as entropy and mutual information [1]. Submodular functions have subgradients and subdifferentials [2] and admit…
Submodular set-functions have many applications in combinatorial optimization, as they can be minimized and approximately maximized in polynomial time. A key element in many of the algorithms and analyses is the possibility of extending the…
Submodular functions are relevant to machine learning for at least two reasons: (1) some problems may be expressed directly as the optimization of submodular functions and (2) the lovasz extension of submodular functions provides a useful…
Submodularity is a discrete domain functional property that can be interpreted as mimicking the role of the well-known convexity/concavity properties in the continuous domain. Submodular functions exhibit strong structure that lead to…
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…
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…
Submodularity is a fundamental phenomenon in combinatorial optimization. Submodular functions occur in a variety of combinatorial settings such as coverage problems, cut problems, welfare maximization, and many more. Therefore, a lot of…
Submodular function minimization is well studied, and existing algorithms solve it exactly or up to arbitrary accuracy. However, in many applications, such as structured sparse learning or batch Bayesian optimization, the objective function…
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…
In this paper, we study classes of discrete convex functions: submodular functions on modular semilattices and L-convex functions on oriented modular graphs. They were introduced by the author in complexity classification of minimum…
A key idea in convex optimization theory is to use well-structured affine functions to approximate general functions, leading to impactful developments in conjugate functions and convex duality theory. This raises the question: what are the…
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…
In this paper, we unify and improve existing results on characterizing strict and almost stricty convex functions via subdifferential mapping, Moreau envelope, and proximal mappings. In particular, it is shown that if a convex function is…
Continuous DR-submodular functions are a class of functions that satisfy the Diminishing Returns (DR) property, which implies that they are concave along non-negative directions. Existing works have studied monotone continuous DR-submodular…
We consider the problem of maximizing submodular functions; while this problem is known to be NP-hard, several numerically efficient local search techniques with approximation guarantees are available. In this paper, we propose a novel…
We examine the duality theory for a class of non-convex functions obtained by composing a convex function with a continuous one. Using Fenchel duality, we derive a dual problem that satisfies weak duality under general assumptions. To…
We investigate two new optimization problems -- minimizing a submodular function subject to a submodular lower bound constraint (submodular cover) and maximizing a submodular function subject to a submodular upper bound constraint…
Discrete Fenchel duality is one of the central issues in discrete convex analysis. The Fenchel-type min-max theorem for a pair of integer-valued M-natural-convex functions generalizes the min-max formulas for polymatroid intersection 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…
This paper investigates general and generalized differentiation properties of the optimal value function associated with perturbed optimization problems. Fundamental results on nearly convex sets and functions in infinite-dimensional spaces…