Related papers: Submodular Functions: from Discrete to Continous D…
We introduce the notion of $t$-sum of squares (sos) submodularity, which is a hierarchy, indexed by $t$, of sufficient algebraic conditions for certifying submodularity of set functions. We show that, for fixed $t$, each level of the…
Optimization problems involving minimization of a rank-one convex function over constraints modeling restrictions on the support of the decision variables emerge in various machine learning applications. These problems are often modeled…
We study the problem of maximizing a function that is approximately submodular under a cardinality constraint. Approximate submodularity implicitly appears in a wide range of applications as in many cases errors in evaluation of a…
We consider the optimal coverage problem where a multi-agent network is deployed in an environment with obstacles to maximize a joint event detection probability. The objective function of this problem is non-convex and no global optimum is…
This work explores the novel idea of learning a submodular scoring function to improve the specificity/selectivity of existing feature attribution methods. Submodular scores are natural for attribution as they are known to accurately model…
Weak submodularity is a natural relaxation of the diminishing return property, which is equivalent to submodularity. Weak submodularity has been used to show that many (monotone) functions that arise in practice can be efficiently maximized…
A fundamental task underlying many important optimization problems, from influence maximization to sensor placement to content recommendation, is to select the optimal group of $k$ items from a larger set. Submodularity has been very…
This paper introduces the notion of upper-linearizable/quadratizable functions, a class that extends concavity and DR-submodularity in various settings, including monotone and non-monotone cases over different convex sets. A general…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are a kind of nature-inspired general-purpose optimization algorithm, and have shown empirically good performance in solving various real-word optimization problems. During the past two decades, promising…
Maximizing a submodular function has a wide range of applications in machine learning and data mining. One such application is data summarization whose goal is to select a small set of representative and diverse data items from a large…
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…
We show that there is a largely unexplored class of functions (positive polymatroids) that can define proper discrete metrics over pairs of binary vectors and that are fairly tractable to optimize over. By exploiting submodularity, we are…
Diminishing-returns (DR) submodular optimization is an important field with many real-world applications in machine learning, economics and communication systems. It captures a subclass of non-convex optimization that provides both…
The goal of a sequential decision making problem is to design an interactive policy that adaptively selects a group of items, each selection is based on the feedback from the past, in order to maximize the expected utility of selected…
We consider a general conic mixed-binary set where each homogeneous conic constraint $j$ involves an affine function of independent continuous variables and an epigraph variable associated with a nonnegative function, $f_j$, of common…
It has been well established that first order optimization methods can converge to the maximal objective value of concave functions and provide constant factor approximation guarantees for (non-convex/non-concave) continuous submodular…
We consider estimating a compact set from finite data by approximating the support function of that set via sublinear regression. Support functions uniquely characterize a compact set up to closure of convexification, and are sublinear…
We investigate a more generalized form of submodular maximization, referred to as $k$-submodular maximization, with applications across social networks and machine learning domains. In this work, we propose the multilinear extension of…
We identity the optimal non-infinitesimal direction of descent for a convex function. An algorithm is developed that can theoretically minimize a subset of (non-convex) functions.
Distributed maximization of a submodular function in the MapReduce (MR) model has received much attention, culminating in two frameworks that allow a centralized algorithm to be run in the MR setting without loss of approximation, as long…