Related papers: An Efficient Framework for Balancing Submodularity…
Many important problems in discrete optimization require maximization of a monotonic submodular function subject to matroid constraints. For these problems, a simple greedy algorithm is guaranteed to obtain near-optimal solutions. In this…
Submodular functions are well-studied in combinatorial optimization, game theory and economics. The natural diminishing returns property makes them suitable for many applications. We study an extension of monotone submodular functions,…
Many algorithms for maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a knapsack constraint rely on the natural greedy heuristic. We present a novel refined analysis of this greedy heuristic which enables us to: $(1)$ reduce the…
Many robotic systems deal with uncertainty by performing a sequence of information gathering actions. In this work, we focus on the problem of efficiently constructing such a sequence by drawing an explicit connection to submodularity.…
We consider the problem of maximizing a monotone nondecreasing set function under multiple constraints, where the constraints are also characterized by monotone nondecreasing set functions. We propose two greedy algorithms to solve the…
The standard greedy algorithm has been recently shown to enjoy approximation guarantees for constrained non-submodular nondecreasing set function maximization. While these recent results allow to better characterize the empirical success of…
The problem of selecting a small-size representative summary of a large dataset is a cornerstone of machine learning, optimization and data science. Motivated by applications to recommendation systems and other scenarios with query-limited…
The maximization of submodular functions is an NP-Hard problem for certain subclasses of functions, for which a simple greedy algorithm has been shown to guarantee a solution whose quality is within 1/2 of the optimal. When this algorithm…
We present a simple combinatorial $\frac{1 -e^{-2}}{2}$-approximation algorithm for maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a knapsack and a matroid constraint. This classic problem is known to be hard to approximate within…
Submodular function optimization has numerous applications in machine learning and data analysis, including data summarization which aims to identify a concise and diverse set of data points from a large dataset. It is important to…
We consider interactive learning and covering problems, in a setting where actions may incur different costs, depending on the response to the action. We propose a natural greedy algorithm for response-dependent costs. We bound the…
Submodular optimization generalizes many classic problems in combinatorial optimization and has recently found a wide range of applications in machine learning (e.g., feature engineering and active learning). For many large-scale…
We study \emph{combinatorial procurement auctions}, where a buyer with a valuation function $v$ and budget $B$ wishes to buy a set of items. Each item $i$ has a cost $c_i$ and the buyer is interested in a set $S$ that maximizes $v(S)$…
We study the problem of selecting a subset of k random variables from a large set, in order to obtain the best linear prediction of another variable of interest. This problem can be viewed in the context of both feature selection and sparse…
We study a fundamental problem in Bayesian learning, where the goal is to select a set of data sources with minimum cost while achieving a certain learning performance based on the data streams provided by the selected data sources. First,…
We study planning with submodular objective functions, where instead of maximizing the cumulative reward, the goal is to maximize the objective value induced by a submodular function. Our framework subsumes standard planning and submodular…
In this work, we study the Submodular Cost Submodular Cover problem, which is to minimize the submodular cost required to ensure that the submodular benefit function exceeds a given threshold. Existing approximation ratios for the greedy…
Subset selection tasks, arise in recommendation systems and search engines and ask to select a subset of items that maximize the value for the user. The values of subsets often display diminishing returns, and hence, submodular functions…
In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing $k$-submodular functions subject to a knapsack constraint. For monotone objective functions, we present a $\frac{1}{2}(1-e^{-2})\approx 0.432$ greedy approximation algorithm. For the…
We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to…