Related papers: Concave Aspects of Submodular Functions
Functions with uniform sublevel sets can represent orders, preference relations or other binary relations and thus turn out to be a tool for scalarization that can be used in multicriteria optimization, decision theory, mathematical…
Approximations of functions with finite data often do not respect certain "structural" properties of the functions. For example, if a given function is non-negative, a polynomial approximation of the function is not necessarily also…
With the extensive application of submodularity, its generalizations are constantly being proposed. However, most of them are tailored for special problems. In this paper, we focus on quasi-submodularity, a universal generalization, which…
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…
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…
We analyze the performance of the greedy algorithm, and also a discrete semi-gradient based algorithm, for maximizing the sum of a suBmodular and suPermodular (BP) function (both of which are non-negative monotone non-decreasing) under two…
The scalability of submodular optimization methods is critical for their usability in practice. In this paper, we study the reducibility of submodular functions, a property that enables us to reduce the solution space of submodular…
A natural connection between rational functions of several real or complex variables, and subspace collections is explored. A new class of function, superfunctions, are introduced which are the counterpart to functions at the level of…
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…
The paper is devoted to the study, characterizations, and applications of variational convexity of functions, the property that has been recently introduced by Rockafellar together with its strong counterpart. First we show that these…
In this note we provide a full conjugacy and subdifferential calculus for convex convex-composite functions in finite-dimensional space. Our approach, based on infimal convolution and cone-convexity, is straightforward and yields the…
Maximizing submodular objectives under constraints is a fundamental problem in machine learning and optimization. We study the maximization of a nonnegative, non-monotone $\gamma$-weakly DR-submodular function over a down-closed convex…
A new directional derivative and a new subdifferential for set-valued convex functions are constructed, and a set-valued version of the so-called 'max-formula' is proven. The new concepts are used to characterize solutions of convex…
Submodularity is an important concept in combinatorial optimization, and it is often regarded as a discrete analog of convexity. It is a fundamental fact that the set of minimizers of any submodular function forms a distributive lattice.…
We show that there is a largely unexplored class of functions (positive polymatroids) that can define proper discrete metrics over pairs of binary vectors and that are fairly tractable to optimize over. By exploiting submodularity, we are…
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…
We introduce a new convex optimization problem, termed quadratic decomposable submodular function minimization. The problem is closely related to decomposable submodular function minimization and arises in many learning on graphs and…
A function $F$ defined on all subsets of a finite ground set $E$ is quasi-concave if $F(X\cup Y)\geq\min\{F(X),F(Y)\}$ for all $X,Y\subset E$. Quasi-concave functions arise in many fields of mathematics and computer science such as social…
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…
We start with an overview of a class of submodular functions called SCMMs (sums of concave composed with non-negative modular functions plus a final arbitrary modular). We then define a new class of submodular functions we call {\em deep…