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Sample average approximation (SAA) replaces an intractable expected objective by an empirical average and is a basic device of modern stochastic optimization. We develop a rate theory for optimal values and empirical…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
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…
We consider a class of submodular maximization problems in which decision-makers have limited access to the objective function. We explore scenarios where the decision-maker can observe only pairwise information, i.e., can evaluate the…
In this paper, we present an algorithm for minimizing the difference between two submodular functions using a variational framework which is based on (an extension of) the concave-convex procedure [17]. Because several commonly used metrics…
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…
In monotone submodular function maximization, approximation guarantees based on the curvature of the objective function have been extensively studied in the literature. However, the notion of curvature is often pessimistic, and we rarely…
Optimizing non-convex functions is a fundamental challenge across machine learning and combinatorial optimization. We introduce and study $\gamma$-weakly $\theta$-up-concavity, a novel first-order condition that characterizes a broad class…
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…
We develop a mathematical theory of symmetry protected trivial (SPT) orders and anomaly-free symmetry enriched topological (SET) orders in all dimensions via two different approaches with an emphasis on the second approach. The first…
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…
Weak supervision (WS) is a rich set of techniques that produce pseudolabels by aggregating easily obtained but potentially noisy label estimates from a variety of sources. WS is theoretically well understood for binary classification, where…
The general construction of lattice (co)homology assigns to a lattice $\mathbb{Z}^r$ and a weight function $w:\mathbb{Z}^r \to \mathbb{Z}$ a bigraded $\mathbb{Z}[U]$-module $\mathbb{H}_*$. The weight function $w$ is often obtained from some…
The multilinear framework has achieved the breakthrough $1-1/e$ approximation for maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a matroid constraint. This framework has a continuous optimization part and a rounding part. We extend…
Submodular functions -- functions exhibiting diminishing returns -- are central to machine learning. When the objective is monotone and non-negative, the greedy algorithm achieves a tight $63\%$ approximation. But many practical objectives…
In the Secretary Problem, one has to hire the best among n candidates. The candidates are interviewed, one at a time, at a random order, and one has to decide on the spot, whether to hire a candidate or continue interviewing. It is well…
We formulate and optimally solve a new generalized Set Similarity Search problem, which assumes the size of the database and query sets are known in advance. By creating polylog copies of our data-structure, we optimally solve any symmetric…
We develop a Mean-Field (MF) view of the learning dynamics of overparametrized Artificial Neural Networks (NN) under data symmetric in law wrt the action of a general compact group $G$. We consider for this a class of generalized shallow…
We study streaming submodular maximization subject to matching/$b$-matching constraints (MSM/MSbM), and present improved upper and lower bounds for these problems. On the upper bounds front, we give primal-dual algorithms achieving the…
The submodular width is a complexity measure of conjunctive queries (CQs), which assigns a nonnegative real number, subw(Q), to each CQ Q. An existing algorithm, called PAND, performs CQ evaluation in polynomial time where the exponent is…