Related papers: Concave Aspects of Submodular Functions
Submodular maximization generalizes many fundamental problems in discrete optimization, including Max-Cut in directed/undirected graphs, maximum coverage, maximum facility location and marketing over social networks. In this paper we…
This work is concerned with the convex analysis of functions defined on (not necessarily finite-dimensional) Hilbert spaces whose values depend solely on a certain ``spectrum'' of the arguments, a class we term ``spectral functions.'' We…
This paper presents the input convex neural network architecture. These are scalar-valued (potentially deep) neural networks with constraints on the network parameters such that the output of the network is a convex function of (some of)…
Maximizing a single submodular set function subject to a cardinality constraint is a well-studied and central topic in combinatorial optimization. However, finding a set that maximizes multiple functions at the same time is much less…
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…
The softmax function is a ubiquitous component at the output of neural networks and increasingly in intermediate layers as well. This paper provides convex lower bounds and concave upper bounds on the softmax function, which are compatible…
Robust Optimization is becoming increasingly important in machine learning applications. This paper studies the problem of robust submodular minimization subject to combinatorial constraints. Constrained Submodular Minimization arises in…
Submodular function minimization (SFM) is a fundamental and efficiently solvable problem class in combinatorial optimization with a multitude of applications in various fields. Surprisingly, there is only very little known about constraint…
A fundamental task underlying many important optimization problems, from influence maximization to sensor placement to content recommendation, is to select the optimal group of $k$ items from a larger set. Submodularity has been very…
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…
In this paper, we study a fundamental problem in submodular optimization, which is called sequential submodular maximization. Specifically, we aim to select and rank a group of $k$ items from a ground set $V$ such that the weighted…
Submodular function maximization is a central problem in combinatorial optimization, generalizing many important problems including Max Cut in directed/undirected graphs and in hypergraphs, certain constraint satisfaction problems, maximum…
The notion of ordinal concavity of utility functions has recently been considered by Hafalir, Kojima, Yenmez, and Yokote in economics while there exist earlier related works in discrete optimization and operations research. In the present…
The problem of minimizing the difference of two convex functions is called polyhedral d.c. optimization problem if at least one of the two component functions is polyhedral. We characterize the existence of global optimal solutions of…
Entropy functionals (i.e. convex integral functionals) and extensions of these functionals are minimized on convex sets. This paper is aimed at reducing as much as possible the assumptions on the constraint set. Dual equalities and…
In this paper we consider convex optimization problems with stochastic composite objective function subject to (possibly) infinite intersection of constraints. The objective function is expressed in terms of expectation operator over a sum…
We introduce the notion of $t$-sum of squares (sos) submodularity, which is a hierarchy, indexed by $t$, of sufficient algebraic conditions for certifying submodularity of set functions. We show that, for fixed $t$, each level of the…
In this work, we introduce a new class of non-convex functions, called implicit concave functions, which are compositions of a concave function with a continuously differentiable mapping. We analyze the properties of their minimization by…
We study the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function with viability constraints. This problem originates from computational biology, where we are given a phylogenetic tree over a set of species and a directed graph, the…
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…