Related papers: Restricted Strong Convexity Implies Weak Submodula…

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…

Motivated by modern applications such as computerized adaptive testing, sequential rank aggregation, and heterogeneous data source selection, we study the problem of active sequential estimation, which involves adaptively selecting…

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…

We introduce a new convex optimization problem, termed quadratic decomposable submodular function minimization. The problem is closely related to decomposable submodular function minimization and arises in many learning on graphs and…

Nonlinear kernels can be approximated using finite-dimensional feature maps for efficient risk minimization. Due to the inherent trade-off between the dimension of the (mapped) feature space and the approximation accuracy, the key problem…

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…

We study distributed composite optimization over networks: agents minimize a sum of smooth (strongly) convex functions, the agents' sum-utility, plus a nonsmooth (extended-valued) convex one. We propose a general unified algorithmic…

Most supervised learning models are trained for full automation. However, their predictions are sometimes worse than those by human experts on some specific instances. Motivated by this empirical observation, our goal is to design…

Kernel based methods provide a way to reconstruct potentially high-dimensional functions from meshfree samples, i.e., sampling points and corresponding target values. A crucial ingredient for this to be successful is the distribution of the…

Learning of low-rank matrices is fundamental to many machine learning applications. A state-of-the-art algorithm is the rank-one matrix pursuit (R1MP). However, it can only be used in matrix completion problems with the square loss. In this…

In many machine learning applications, one needs to interactively select a sequence of items (e.g., recommending movies based on a user's feedback) or make sequential decisions in a certain order (e.g., guiding an agent through a series of…

Often times, in many design problems, there is a need to select a small set of informative or representative elements from a large ground set of entities in an optimal fashion. Submodular optimization that provides for a formal way to solve…

We study the problem of maximizing constrained non-monotone submodular functions and provide approximation algorithms that improve existing algorithms in terms of either the approximation factor or simplicity. Our algorithms combine…

Optimization models with non-convex constraints arise in many tasks in machine learning, e.g., learning with fairness constraints or Neyman-Pearson classification with non-convex loss. Although many efficient methods have been developed…

In this paper we consider a class of optimization problems with a strongly convex objective function and the feasible set given by an intersection of a simple convex set with a set given by a number of linear equality and inequality…

This paper describes a simple greedy D-approximation algorithm for any covering problem whose objective function is submodular and non-decreasing, and whose feasible region can be expressed as the intersection of arbitrary (closed upwards)…

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 study submodular maximization problems with matroid constraints, in particular, problems where the objective can be expressed via compositions of analytic and multilinear functions. We show that for functions of this form, the so-called…

We study the problem of maximizing a submodular function, subject to a cardinality constraint, with a set of agents communicating over a connected graph. We propose a distributed greedy algorithm that allows all the agents to converge to a…

We point out an issue with Theorem 5 appearing in "Group-based active query selection for rapid diagnosis in time-critical situations". Theorem 5 bounds the expected number of queries for a greedy algorithm to identify the class of an item…