Related papers: Submodularity in Action: From Machine Learning to …
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…
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…
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…
Submodularity is a fundamental phenomenon in combinatorial optimization. Submodular functions occur in a variety of combinatorial settings such as coverage problems, cut problems, welfare maximization, and many more. Therefore, a lot of…
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…
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…
Minimax optimization has been central in addressing various applications in machine learning, game theory, and control theory. Prior literature has thus far mainly focused on studying such problems in the continuous domain, e.g.,…
In many naturally occurring optimization problems one needs to ensure that the definition of the optimization problem lends itself to solutions that are tractable to compute. In cases where exact solutions cannot be computed tractably, it…
Submodularity is one of the most well-studied properties of problem classes in combinatorial optimization and many applications of machine learning and data mining, with strong implications for guaranteed optimization. In this thesis, we…
Submodular functions are discrete functions that model laws of diminishing returns and enjoy numerous algorithmic applications. They have been used in many areas, including combinatorial optimization, machine learning, and economics. In…
Submodularity is a key property in discrete optimization. Submodularity has been widely used for analyzing the greedy algorithm to give performance bounds and providing insight into the construction of valid inequalities for mixed-integer…
Over the last two decades, submodular function maximization has been the workhorse of many discrete optimization problems in machine learning applications. Traditionally, the study of submodular functions was based on binary function…
Recently, it has become evident that submodularity naturally captures widely occurring concepts in machine learning, signal processing and computer vision. Consequently, there is need for efficient optimization procedures for submodular…
Stochastic optimization of continuous objectives is at the heart of modern machine learning. However, many important problems are of discrete nature and often involve submodular objectives. We seek to unleash the power of stochastic…
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…
In model selection problems for machine learning, the desire for a well-performing model with meaningful structure is typically expressed through a regularized optimization problem. In many scenarios, however, the meaningful structure is…
We present a practical and powerful new framework for both unconstrained and constrained submodular function optimization based on discrete semidifferentials (sub- and super-differentials). The resulting algorithms, which repeatedly compute…
We investigate two new optimization problems -- minimizing a submodular function subject to a submodular lower bound constraint (submodular cover) and maximizing a submodular function subject to a submodular upper bound constraint…
Seminal work by Edmonds and Lovasz shows the strong connection between submodularity and convexity. Submodular functions have tight modular lower bounds, and subdifferentials in a manner akin to convex functions. They also admit poly-time…
We demonstrate the usefulness of submodularity in statistics as a characterization of the difficulty of the \emph{search} problem of feature selection. The search problem is the ability of a procedure to identify an informative set of…