Related papers: A Local Search Algorithm for the Min-Sum Submodula…
Solving stochastic optimization problems under partial observability, where one needs to adaptively make decisions with uncertain outcomes, is a fundamental but notoriously difficult challenge. In this paper, we introduce the concept of…
We introduce the problem of maximizing approximately $k$-submodular functions subject to size constraints. In this problem, one seeks to select $k$-disjoint subsets of a ground set with bounded total size or individual sizes, and maximum…
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…
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…
We consider the exploration problem: an agent equipped with a depth sensor must map out a previously unknown environment using as few sensor measurements as possible. We propose an approach based on supervised learning of a greedy…
Consider the classical Min-Sum Set Cover problem: We are given a universe $\mathcal{U}$ of $n$ elements and a collection $\mathcal{S}$ of $k$ subsets of $\mathcal{U}$. Moreover, a cost function is associated with each set. The goal is to…
In the classical selection problem, the input consists of a collection of elements and the goal is to pick a subset of elements from the collection such that some objective function $f$ is maximized. This problem has been studied…
A $k$-submodular function is a generalization of the submodular set function. Many practical applications can be modeled as maximizing a $k$-submodular function, such as multi-cooperative games, sensor placement with $k$ type sensors,…
A $k$-submodular function naturally generalizes submodular functions by taking as input $k$ disjoint subsets, rather than a single subset. Unlike standard submodular maximization, which only requires selecting elements for the solution,…
We study a fundamental problem in Bayesian learning, where the goal is to select a set of data sources with minimum cost while achieving a certain learning performance based on the data streams provided by the selected data sources. First,…
The submodular maximization problem is widely applicable in many engineering problems where objectives exhibit diminishing returns. While this problem is known to be NP-hard for certain subclasses of objective functions, there is a greedy…
We study sparsity in the max-plus algebraic setting. We seek both exact and approximate solutions of the max-plus linear equation with minimum cardinality of support. In the former case, the sparsest solution problem is shown to be…
In the submodular cover problem, we are given a monotone submodular function $f$, and we want to pick the min-cost set $S$ such that $f(S) = f(N)$. Motivated by problems in network monitoring and resource allocation, we consider the…
Submodular optimization generalizes many classic problems in combinatorial optimization and has recently found a wide range of applications in machine learning (e.g., feature engineering and active learning). For many large-scale…
A flaw in the greedy approximation algorithm proposed by Zhang et al. for minimum connected set cover problem is corrected, and a stronger result on the approximation ratio of the modified greedy algorithm is established. The results are…
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 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…
In this work, we treat the problem of multi-task submodular optimization from the perspective of local distributional robustness within the neighborhood of a reference distribution which assigns an importance score to each task. We…
We study parallel algorithms for the problem of maximizing a non-negative submodular function. Our main result is an algorithm that achieves a nearly-optimal $1/2 -\epsilon$ approximation using $O(\log(1/\epsilon) / \epsilon)$ parallel…
Submodular maximization has been widely studied over the past decades, mostly because of its numerous applications in real-world problems. It is well known that the standard greedy algorithm guarantees a worst-case approximation factor of…