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It is generally believed that submodular functions -- and the more general class of $\gamma$-weakly submodular functions -- may only be optimized under the non-negativity assumption $f(S) \geq 0$. In this paper, we show that once the…

Motivated by, e.g., sensitivity analysis and end-to-end learning, the demand for differentiable optimization algorithms has been significantly increasing. In this paper, we establish a theoretically guaranteed versatile framework that makes…

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…

We consider the maximization of a submodular objective function $f:2^U\to\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}$, where the objective $f$ is not accessed as a value oracle but instead subject to noisy queries. We introduce a versatile adaptive sampling…

We study the problem of maximizing a monotone set function subject to a cardinality constraint $k$ in the setting where some number of elements $\tau$ is deleted from the returned set. The focus of this work is on the worst-case adversarial…

In machine learning and big data, the optimization objectives based on set-cover, entropy, diversity, influence, feature selection, etc. are commonly modeled as submodular functions. Submodular (function) maximization is generally NP-hard,…

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…

Non-monotone constrained submodular maximization plays a crucial role in various machine learning applications. However, existing algorithms often struggle with a trade-off between approximation guarantees and practical efficiency. The…

Optimization problems with set submodular objective functions have many real-world applications. In discrete scenarios, where the same item can be selected more than once, the domain is generalized from a 2-element set to a bounded integer…

Submodular continuous functions are a category of (generally) non-convex/non-concave functions with a wide spectrum of applications. We characterize these functions and demonstrate that they can be maximized efficiently with approximation…

We consider two classic problems: maximum coverage and monotone submodular maximization subject to a cardinality constraint. [Nemhauser--Wolsey--Fisher '78] proved that the greedy algorithm provides an approximation of $1-1/e$ for both…

As the scales of data sets expand rapidly in some application scenarios, increasing efforts have been made to develop fast submodular maximization algorithms. This paper presents a currently the most efficient algorithm for maximizing…

We consider classes of objective functions of cardinality constrained maximization problems for which the greedy algorithm guarantees a constant approximation. We propose the new class of $\gamma$-$\alpha$-augmentable functions and prove…

Submodular maximization has been widely studied over the past decades, mostly because of its numerous applications in real-world problems. It is well known that the standard greedy algorithm guarantees a worst-case approximation factor of…

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…

In this work, we present a new algorithm for maximizing a non-monotone submodular function subject to a general constraint. Our algorithm finds an approximate fractional solution for maximizing the multilinear extension of the function over…

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…

We propose and analyze batch greedy heuristics for cardinality constrained maximization of non-submodular non-decreasing set functions. We consider the standard greedy paradigm, along with its distributed greedy and stochastic greedy…

For many optimization problems in machine learning, finding an optimal solution is computationally intractable and we seek algorithms that perform well in practice. Since computational intractability often results from pathological…

Maximization of {\it non-submodular} functions appears in various scenarios, and many previous works studied it based on some measures that quantify the closeness to being submodular. On the other hand, many practical non-submodular…