Related papers: Non-Smooth, H\"older-Smooth, and Robust Submodular…
We study distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems where the ambiguity set is defined using the Wasserstein metric. We show that this class of DRO problems can be reformulated as semi-infinite programs. We give an exchange method…
In this paper, we propose a general class of algorithms for optimizing an extensive variety of nonsmoothly penalized objective functions that satisfy certain regularity conditions. The proposed framework utilizes the…
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 present new tight performance guarantees for the greedy maximization of nondecreasing submodular set functions. Our main result first provides a performance guarantee in terms of the overlap of the optimal and greedy solutions. As a…
Submodularity is one of the most well-studied properties of problem classes in combinatorial optimization and many applications of machine learning and data mining, with strong implications for guaranteed optimization. In this thesis, we…
We consider the problem of maximizing non-negative non-decreasing set functions. Although most of the recent work focus on exploiting submodularity, it turns out that several objectives we encounter in practice are not submodular.…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are known to be sensitive to parameter specification. Distributionally robust MDPs alleviate this issue by allowing for \emph{ambiguity sets} which give a set of possible distributions over parameter sets.…
This paper describes a simple greedy D-approximation algorithm for any covering problem whose objective function is submodular and non-decreasing, and whose feasible region can be expressed as the intersection of arbitrary (closed upwards)…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…
We consider parallel, or low adaptivity, algorithms for submodular function maximization. This line of work was recently initiated by Balkanski and Singer and has already led to several interesting results on the cardinality constraint and…
In this paper, we study the tradeoff between the approximation guarantee and adaptivity for the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a cardinality constraint. The adaptivity of an algorithm is the number of…
The usual approach to developing and analyzing first-order methods for non-smooth (stochastic or deterministic) convex optimization assumes that the objective function is uniformly Lipschitz continuous with parameter $M_f$. However, in many…
We present a new perspective on the celebrated Sinkhorn algorithm by showing that is a special case of incremental/stochastic mirror descent. In order to see this, one should simply plug Kullback-Leibler divergence in both mirror map and…
We consider learning of submodular functions from data. These functions are important in machine learning and have a wide range of applications, e.g. data summarization, feature selection and active learning. Despite their combinatorial…
We consider distributed optimization with smooth convex objective functions defined on an undirected connected graph. Inspired by mirror descent mehod and RLC circuits, we propose a novel distributed mirror descent method. Compared with…
We consider the optimisation problem of adding $k$ links to a given network, such that the resulting effective graph resistance is as small as possible. The problem was recently proven to be NP-hard, such that optimal solutions obtained…
This work provides performance guarantees for the greedy solution of experimental design problems. In particular, it focuses on A- and E-optimal designs, for which typical guarantees do not apply since the mean-square error and the maximum…
This paper considers non-smooth optimization problems where we seek to minimize the pointwise maximum of a continuously parameterized family of functions. Since the objective function is given as the solution to a maximization problem,…
The problem of maximizing nonnegative monotone submodular functions under a certain constraint has been intensively studied in the last decade, and a wide range of efficient approximation algorithms have been developed for this problem.…
Non-smooth optimization is a core ingredient of many imaging or machine learning pipelines. Non-smoothness encodes structural constraints on the solutions, such as sparsity, group sparsity, low-rank and sharp edges. It is also the basis for…