Related papers: Adaptive approximation of monotone functions
Methods have previously been developed for the approximation of Lyapunov functions using radial basis functions. However these methods assume that the evolution equations are known. We consider the problem of approximating a given Lyapunov…
We consider minimization of composite functions of the form $f(g(x))+h(x)$, where $f$ and $h$ are convex functions (which can be nonsmooth) and $g$ is a smooth vector mapping. In addition, we assume that $g$ is the average of finite number…
In applied mathematics, especially in optimization, functions are often only provided as so called "Black-Boxes" provided by software packages, or very complex algorithms, which make automatic differentation very complicated or even…
Global optimization of black-box functions from noisy samples is a fundamental challenge in machine learning and scientific computing. Traditional methods such as Bayesian Optimization often converge to local minima on multi-modal…
A common approach for minimizing a smooth nonlinear function is to employ finite-difference approximations to the gradient. While this can be easily performed when no error is present within the function evaluations, when the function is…
In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing $k$-submodular functions subject to a knapsack constraint. For monotone objective functions, we present a $\frac{1}{2}(1-e^{-2})\approx 0.432$ greedy approximation algorithm. For the…
Approximating a function $f(x)$ on $[-1,1]$ based on $N+1$ samples is a classical problem in numerical analysis. If the samples come with heteroskedastic noise depending on $x$ of variance $\sigma(x)^2$, an $O(N\log N)$ algorithm for this…
We consider the problem of stochastic monotone submodular function maximization, subject to constraints. We give results on adaptivity gaps, and on the gap between the optimal offline and online solutions. We present a procedure that…
Population risk is always of primary interest in machine learning; however, learning algorithms only have access to the empirical risk. Even for applications with nonconvex nonsmooth losses (such as modern deep networks), the population…
This study investigated typical performance of approximation algorithms known as belief propagation, greedy algorithm, and linear-programming relaxation for maximum coverage problems on sparse biregular random graphs. After using the cavity…
In this paper we develop a procedure to deal with a family of parameter-dependent ill-posed problems, for which the exact solution in general does not exist. The original problems are relaxed by considering corresponding approximate ones,…
We study the problem of global maximization of a function f given a finite number of evaluations perturbed by noise. We consider a very weak assumption on the function, namely that it is locally smooth (in some precise sense) with respect…
We study the problem of maximizing constrained non-monotone submodular functions and provide approximation algorithms that improve existing algorithms in terms of either the approximation factor or simplicity. Our algorithms combine…
We formulate an affine invariant implementation of the accelerated first-order algorithm in Nesterov (1983). Its complexity bound is proportional to an affine invariant regularity constant defined with respect to the Minkowski gauge of the…
We propose new proximal bundle algorithms for minimizing a nonsmooth convex function. These algorithms are derived from the application of Nesterov fast gradient methods for smooth convex minimization to the so-called Moreau-Yosida…
Given a set $P$ of $n$ planar points, two axes and a real-valued score function $f()$ on subsets of $P$, the Optimal Planar Box problem consists in finding a box (i.e. axis-aligned rectangle) $H$ maximizing $f(H\cap P)$. We consider the…
In this article, we present a family of numerical approaches to solve high-dimensional linear non-symmetric problems. The principle of these methods is to approximate a function which depends on a large number of variates by a sum of tensor…
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…
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…
The standard greedy algorithm has been recently shown to enjoy approximation guarantees for constrained non-submodular nondecreasing set function maximization. While these recent results allow to better characterize the empirical success of…