Related papers: Instance Specific Approximations for Submodular Ma…
Submodular optimization has received significant attention in both practice and theory, as a wide array of problems in machine learning, auction theory, and combinatorial optimization have submodular structure. In practice, these problems…
Submodular maximization subject to matroid constraints is a central problem with many applications in machine learning. As algorithms are increasingly used in decision-making over datapoints with sensitive attributes such as gender or race,…
A wide variety of problems in machine learning, including exemplar clustering, document summarization, and sensor placement, can be cast as constrained submodular maximization problems. Unfortunately, the resulting submodular optimization…
Many large-scale machine learning problems--clustering, non-parametric learning, kernel machines, etc.--require selecting a small yet representative subset from a large dataset. Such problems can often be reduced to maximizing a submodular…
We provide theoretical bounds on the worst case performance of the greedy algorithm in seeking to maximize a normalized, monotone, but not necessarily submodular objective function under a simple partition matroid constraint. We also…
We study the problem of maximizing a non-negative monotone submodular objective $f$ subject to the intersection of $k$ arbitrary matroid constraints. The natural greedy algorithm guarantees $(k+1)$-approximation for this problem, and the…
We study the problem of maximizing a function that is approximately submodular under a cardinality constraint. Approximate submodularity implicitly appears in a wide range of applications as in many cases errors in evaluation of a…
We consider the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function under noise. There has been a great deal of work on optimization of submodular functions under various constraints, resulting in algorithms that provide desirable…
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…
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…
Identifying cause-effect relations among variables is a key step in the decision-making process. While causal inference requires randomized experiments, researchers and policymakers are increasingly using observational studies to test…
We consider the problem of multi-objective maximization of monotone submodular functions subject to cardinality constraint, often formulated as $\max_{|A|=k}\min_{i\in\{1,\dots,m\}}f_i(A)$. While it is widely known that greedy methods work…
Large-scale subset selection asks for a small useful set of examples, features, sensors, seed users, or context passages from an enormous ground set. Submodular maximization is a canonical model for such diminishing-returns problems, but…
We consider a class of submodular maximization problems in which decision-makers have limited access to the objective function. We explore scenarios where the decision-maker can observe only pairwise information, i.e., can evaluate the…
We propose a new concept named adaptive submodularity ratio to study the greedy policy for sequential decision making. While the greedy policy is known to perform well for a wide variety of adaptive stochastic optimization problems in…
We study minimum entropy submodular optimization, a common generalization of the minimum entropy set cover problem, studied earlier by Cardinal et al., and the submodular set cover problem. We give a general bound of the approximation…
Often times, in many design problems, there is a need to select a small set of informative or representative elements from a large ground set of entities in an optimal fashion. Submodular optimization that provides for a formal way to solve…
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 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…
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.,…