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Submodular functions can be exactly minimized in polynomial time, and the special case that graph cuts solve with max flow \cite{KZ:PAMI04} has had significant impact in computer vision \cite{BVZ:PAMI01,Kwatra:SIGGRAPH03,Rother:GrabCut04}.…
The main result of the paper is motivated by the following two, apparently unrelated graph optimization problems: (A) as an extension of Edmonds' disjoint branchings theorem, characterize digraphs comprising $k$ disjoint branchings $B_i$…
We consider the following class of submodular k-multiway partitioning problems: (Sub-$k$-MP) $\min \sum_{i=1}^k f(S_i): S_1 \uplus S_2 \uplus \cdots \uplus S_k = V \mbox{ and } S_i \neq \emptyset \mbox{ for all }i\in [k]$. Here $f$ is a…
We consider the problem of maximizing a monotone nondecreasing set function under multiple constraints, where the constraints are also characterized by monotone nondecreasing set functions. We propose two greedy algorithms to solve the…
We study the problem of finding a maximum matching in a graph given by an input stream listing its edges in some arbitrary order, where the quantity to be maximized is given by a monotone submodular function on subsets of edges. This…
We extend the work of Narasimhan and Bilmes [30] for minimizing set functions representable as a difference between submodular functions. Similar to [30], our new algorithms are guaranteed to monotonically reduce the objective function at…
Submodular function maximization is a central problem in combinatorial optimization, generalizing many important problems including Max Cut in directed/undirected graphs and in hypergraphs, certain constraint satisfaction problems, maximum…
This paper introduces unified projection-free Frank-Wolfe type algorithms for adversarial continuous DR-submodular optimization, spanning scenarios such as full information and (semi-)bandit feedback, monotone and non-monotone functions,…
Minimizing a convex function of a measure with a sparsity-inducing penalty is a typical problem arising, e.g., in sparse spikes deconvolution or two-layer neural networks training. We show that this problem can be solved by discretizing the…
In many naturally occurring optimization problems one needs to ensure that the definition of the optimization problem lends itself to solutions that are tractable to compute. In cases where exact solutions cannot be computed tractably, it…
The problem of maximizing a non-negative submodular function was introduced by Feige, Mirrokni, and Vondrak [FOCS'07] who provided a deterministic local-search based algorithm that guarantees an approximation ratio of $\frac 1 3$, as well…
We develop a framework for the distributed minimization of submodular functions. Submodular functions are a discrete analog of convex functions and are extensively used in large-scale combinatorial optimization problems. While there has…
Submodular functions have many applications. Matchings have many applications. The bitext word alignment problem can be modeled as the problem of maximizing a nonnegative, monotone, submodular function constrained to matchings in a complete…
This paper investigates the problems large-scale distributed composite convex optimization, with motivations from a broad range of applications, including multi-agent systems, federated learning, smart grids, wireless sensor networks,…
As the scales of data sets expand rapidly in some application scenarios, increasing efforts have been made to develop fast submodular maximization algorithms. This paper presents a currently the most efficient algorithm for maximizing…
We study the minimization of a convex function $f(X)$ over the set of $n\times n$ positive semi-definite matrices, but when the problem is recast as $\min_U g(U) := f(UU^\top)$, with $U \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times r}$ and $r \leq n$. We study…
Minimizing a sum of simple submodular functions of limited support is a special case of general submodular function minimization that has seen numerous applications in machine learning. We develop fast techniques for instances where…
The sampling of probability distributions specified up to a normalization constant is an important problem in both machine learning and statistical mechanics. While classical stochastic sampling methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
Majorization-minimization schemes are a broad class of iterative methods targeting general optimization problems, including nonconvex, nonsmooth and stochastic. These algorithms minimize successively a sequence of upper bounds of the…
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…