Related papers: Near-optimal Approximate Discrete and Continuous S…

We introduce several generalizations of classical computer science problems obtained by replacing simpler objective functions with general submodular functions. The new problems include submodular load balancing, which generalizes load…

We consider the problem of maximizing a nonnegative (possibly non-monotone) submodular set function with or without constraints. Feige et al. [FOCS'07] showed a 2/5-approximation for the unconstrained problem and also proved that no…

Let $f:2^{E} \rightarrow \mathbb{Z}_+$ be a submodular function on a ground set $E = [n]$, and let $P(f)$ denote its extended polymatroid. Given a direction $d \in \mathbb{Z}^n$ with at least one positive entry, the line search problem is…

The task of maximizing a monotone submodular function under a cardinality constraint is at the core of many machine learning and data mining applications, including data summarization, sparse regression and coverage problems. We study this…

We consider the problem of maximizing non-negative non-decreasing set functions. Although most of the recent work focus on exploiting submodularity, it turns out that several objectives we encounter in practice are not submodular.…

We consider the problem of maximizing a submodular function with access to a noisy value oracle for the function instead of an exact value oracle. Similar to prior work, we assume that the noisy oracle is persistent in that multiple calls…

In this paper, we investigate a class of submodular problems which in general are very hard. These include minimizing a submodular cost function under combinatorial constraints, which include cuts, matchings, paths, etc., optimizing a…

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of submodular set functions assuming minimization oracles of each summand function. Most existing approaches reformulate the problem as the convex minimization of the sum of the corresponding…

The optimization of submodular functions on the integer lattice has received much attention recently, but the objective functions of many applications are non-submodular. We provide two approximation algorithms for maximizing a…

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…

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…

In submodular $k$-secretary problem, the goal is to select $k$ items in a randomly ordered input so as to maximize the expected value of a given monotone submodular function on the set of selected items. In this paper, we introduce a…

We provide a generic technique for constructing families of submodular functions to obtain lower bounds for submodular function minimization (SFM). Applying this technique, we prove that any deterministic SFM algorithm on a ground set of…

We present a sublinear query algorithm for outputting a near-optimal low-rank approximation to any positive semidefinite Toeplitz matrix $T \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$. In particular, for any integer rank $k \leq d$ and $\epsilon,\delta >…

We describe a randomized algorithm for producing a near-optimal hierarchical off-diagonal low-rank (HODLR) approximation to an $n\times n$ matrix $\mathbf{A}$, accessible only though matrix-vector products with $\mathbf{A}$ and…

We initiate the study of nonsmooth optimization problems under bounded local subgradient variation, which postulates bounded difference between (sub)gradients in small local regions around points, in either average or maximum sense. The…

This paper studies a class of simple bilevel optimization problems where we minimize a composite convex function at the upper-level subject to a composite convex lower-level problem. Existing methods either provide asymptotic guarantees for…

Many fundamental problems in machine learning can be formulated by the convex program \[ \min_{\theta\in R^d}\ \sum_{i=1}^{n}f_{i}(\theta), \] where each $f_i$ is a convex, Lipschitz function supported on a subset of $d_i$ coordinates of…

Let $(L; \sqcap, \sqcup)$ be a finite lattice and let $n$ be a positive integer. A function $f : L^n \to \mathbb{R}$ is said to be submodular if $f(\tup{a} \sqcap \tup{b}) + f(\tup{a} \sqcup \tup{b}) \leq f(\tup{a}) + f(\tup{b})$ for all…

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…