Related papers: Are Gross Substitutes a Substitute for Submodular …
We consider the class of valuations on indivisible items called gross-substitute (GS). This class was introduced by Kelso and Crawford (1982) and is widely used in studies of markets with indivisibilities. GS is a condition on the…
In this paper we study the approximate learnability of valuations commonly used throughout economics and game theory for the quantitative encoding of agent preferences. We provide upper and lower bounds regarding the learnability of…
Budget feasible mechanism considers algorithmic mechanism design questions where there is a budget constraint on the total payment of the mechanism. An important question in the field is that under which valuation domains there exist budget…
Submodular functions are a fundamental object of study in combinatorial optimization, economics, machine learning, etc. and exhibit a rich combinatorial structure. Many subclasses of submodular functions have also been well studied and…
Substitute valuations (in some contexts called gross substitute valuations) are prominent in combinatorial auction theory. An algorithm is given in this paper for generating a substitute valuation through Monte Carlo simulation. In…
We study a type of reverse (procurement) auction problems in the presence of budget constraints. The general algorithmic problem is to purchase a set of resources, which come at a cost, so as not to exceed a given budget and at the same…
Submodularity is an important concept in integer and combinatorial optimization. A classical submodular set function models the utility of selecting homogenous items from a single ground set, and such selections can be represented by binary…
Subadditive set functions play a pivotal role in computational economics (especially in combinatorial auctions), combinatorial optimization or artificial intelligence applications such as interpretable machine learning. However, specifying…
We study the combinatorial contracting problem of D\"utting et al. [FOCS '21], in which a principal seeks to incentivize an agent to take a set of costly actions. In their model, there is a binary outcome (the agent can succeed or fail),…
Submodular maximization has been the backbone of many important machine-learning problems, and has applications to viral marketing, diversification, sensor placement, and more. However, the study of maximizing submodular functions has…
We define a new class of set functions that in addition to being monotone and subadditive, also admit a very limited form of submodularity defined over a permutation of the ground set. We refer to this permutation as a submodular order.…
Submodular and fractionally subadditive (or equivalently XOS) functions play a fundamental role in combinatorial optimization, algorithmic game theory and machine learning. Motivated by learnability of these classes of functions from random…
Submodular functions have been studied extensively in machine learning and data mining. In particular, the optimization of submodular functions over the integer lattice (integer submodular functions) has recently attracted much interest,…
We demonstrate that from an algorithm guaranteeing an approximation factor for the ratio of submodular (RS) optimization problem, we can build another algorithm having a different kind of approximation guarantee -- weaker than the classical…
Unlike their conventional use as estimators of probability density functions in reinforcement learning (RL), this paper introduces a novel function-approximation role for Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) as direct surrogates for Q-function…
We establish analogues in the context of group actions or group representations of some classical problems and results in additive combinatorics of groups. We also study the notion of left invariant submodular function defined on power sets…
Submodular set functions are undoubtedly among the most important building blocks of combinatorial optimization. Somewhat surprisingly, continuous counterparts of such functions have also appeared in an analytic line of research where they…
In a nutshell, submodular functions encode an intuitive notion of diminishing returns. As a result, submodularity appears in many important machine learning tasks such as feature selection and data summarization. Although there has been a…
Many different systems with explicit substitutions have been proposed to implement a large class of higher-order languages. Motivations and challenges that guided the development of such calculi in functional frameworks are surveyed in the…
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…