Related papers: Polyhedral aspects of Submodularity, Convexity and…
There exist two major subclasses in the class of superquadratic functions, one comprises concave and decreasing functions, while the other consists of convex and monotone increasing functions. Leveraging this distinction, we introduce…
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.…
It is well-known that the convex and concave envelope of a multilinear polynomial over a box are polyhedral functions. Exponential-sized extended and projected formulations for these envelopes are also known. We consider the convexification…
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…
Many problems of theoretical and practical interest involve finding a convex or concave function. For instance, optimization problems such as finding the projection on the convex functions in $H^k(\Omega)$, or some problems in economics. In…
Real continuous submodular functions, as a generalization of the corresponding discrete notion to the continuous domain, gained considerable attention recently. The analog notion for entropy functions requires additional properties: a real…
Maximizing submodular objectives under constraints is a fundamental problem in machine learning and optimization. We study the maximization of a nonnegative, non-monotone $\gamma$-weakly DR-submodular function over a down-closed convex…
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…
We study the minimization of a rank-one quadratic with indicators and show that the underlying set function obtained by projecting out the continuous variables is supermodular. Although supermodular minimization is, in general, difficult,…
Symmetric submodular functions are an important family of submodular functions capturing many interesting cases including cut functions of graphs and hypergraphs. Maximization of such functions subject to various constraints receives little…
It is well-known that every convex function admits an affine support at every interior point of a domain. Convex functions of higher order (precisely of an odd order) have a similar property: they are supported by the polynomials of degree…
The problem of maximizing non-negative submodular functions has been studied extensively in the last few years. However, most papers consider submodular set functions. Recently, several advances have been made for the more general case of…
Estimation of convex functions finds broad applications in engineering and science, while convex shape constraint gives rise to numerous challenges in asymptotic performance analysis. This paper is devoted to minimax optimal estimation of…
We study the polyhedral convex hull structure of a mixed-integer set which arises in a class of cardinality-constrained concave submodular minimization problems. This class of problems has an objective function in the form of $f(a^\top x)$,…
We extend the work of Narasimhan and Bilmes [30] for minimizing set functions representable as a difference between submodular functions. Similar to [30], our new algorithms are guaranteed to monotonically reduce the objective function at…
Submodularity is an important concept in combinatorial optimization, and it is often regarded as a discrete analog of convexity. It is a fundamental fact that the set of minimizers of any submodular function forms a distributive lattice.…
We show that any submodular minimization (SM) problem defined on a linear constraint set with constraints having up to two variables per inequality, are 2-approximable in polynomial time. If the constraints are monotone (the two variables…
The primary goal of the paper is to establish characteristic properties of (extended) real-valued functions defined on normed vector spaces that admit the representation as the lower envelope of their minimal (with respect to pointwise…
In a nutshell, submodular functions encode an intuitive notion of diminishing returns. As a result, submodularity appears in many important machine learning tasks such as feature selection and data summarization. Although there has been a…
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…