Related papers: Testing submodularity and other properties of valu…
Over the last decade, the Dip-test of unimodality has gained increasing interest in the data mining community as it is a parameter-free statistical test that reliably rates the modality in one-dimensional samples. It returns a so called…
In this paper, we study the online learning of real-valued functions where the hidden function is known to have certain smoothness properties. Specifically, for $q \ge 1$, let $\mathcal F_q$ be the class of absolutely continuous functions…
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 give a non-adaptive algorithm that makes $2^{\tilde{O}(\sqrt{k\log(1/\varepsilon_2 - \varepsilon_1)})}$ queries to a Boolean function $f:\{\pm 1\}^n \rightarrow \{\pm 1\}$ and distinguishes between $f$ being $\varepsilon_1$-close to some…
Submodular function maximization has found a wealth of new applications in machine learning models during the past years. The related supermodular maximization models (submodular minimization) also offer an abundance of applications, but…
Suppose we are given a submodular function $f$ over a set of elements, and we want to maximize its value subject to certain constraints. Good approximation algorithms are known for such problems under both monotone and non-monotone…
Testing to see whether a given data set comes from some specified distribution is among the oldest types of problems in Statistics. Many such tests have been developed and their performance studied. The general result has been that while a…
We extend the work of Narasimhan and Bilmes [30] for minimizing set functions representable as a dierence between submodular functions. Similar to [30], our new algorithms are guaranteed to monotonically reduce the objective function at…
The value function plays a crucial role as a measure for the cumulative future reward an agent receives in both reinforcement learning and optimal control. It is therefore of interest to study how similar the values of neighboring states…
This work provides a systematic study of the variational properties of decomposable functions which are compositions of an outer support function and an inner smooth mapping under certain constraint qualifications. A particular focus is put…
It is known that a subharmonic function of finite order $\rho$ can be approximated by the logarithm of the modulus of an entire function at the point $z$ outside an exceptional set up to $C\log|z|$. In this article we prove that if such an…
The relationship between overparameterization, stability, and generalization remains incompletely understood in the setting of discontinuous classifiers. We address this gap by establishing a generalization bound for finite function classes…
We study the problem of testing whether a function f:R^n->R is linear (i.e., both additive and homogeneous) in the distribution-free property testing model, where the distance between functions is measured with respect to an unknown…
Several recent works [DHLNSY25, CPPS25a, CPPS25b] have studied a model of property testing of Boolean functions under a \emph{relative-error} criterion. In this model, the distance from a target function $f: \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ that is…
We demonstrate the usefulness of submodularity in statistics as a characterization of the difficulty of the \emph{search} problem of feature selection. The search problem is the ability of a procedure to identify an informative set of…
In many naturally occurring optimization problems one needs to ensure that the definition of the optimization problem lends itself to solutions that are tractable to compute. In cases where exact solutions cannot be computed tractably, it…
A Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n \mapsto \{0,1\}$ is said to be $\eps$-far from monotone if $f$ needs to be modified in at least $\eps$-fraction of the points to make it monotone. We design a randomized tester that is given oracle access to…
We consider the problem of testing whether an unknown Boolean function $f$ is monotone versus $\epsilon$-far from every monotone function. The two main results of this paper are a new lower bound and a new algorithm for this well-studied…
We survey a few concentration inequalities for submodular and fractionally subadditive functions of independent random variables, implied by the entropy method for self-bounding functions. The power of these concentration bounds is that…
Given a property of Boolean functions, what is the minimum number of queries required to determine with high probability if an input function satisfies this property or is "far" from satisfying it? This is a fundamental question in Property…