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As evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are general-purpose optimization algorithms, recent theoretical studies have tried to analyze their performance for solving general problem classes, with the goal of providing a general theoretical…
Minimax optimization has been central in addressing various applications in machine learning, game theory, and control theory. Prior literature has thus far mainly focused on studying such problems in the continuous domain, e.g.,…
A set function $f$ on a finite set $V$ is submodular if $f(X) + f(Y) \geq f(X \cup Y) + f(X \cap Y)$ for any pair $X, Y \subseteq V$. The symmetric difference transformation (SD-transformation) of $f$ by a canonical set $S \subseteq V$ is a…
This paper proposes and justifies two globally convergent Newton-type methods to solve unconstrained and constrained problems of nonsmooth optimization by using tools of variational analysis and generalized differentiation. Both methods are…
In submodular covering problems, we are given a monotone, nonnegative submodular function $f: 2^N \rightarrow\mathbb{R}_+$ and wish to find the min-cost set $S\subseteq N$ such that $f(S)=f(N)$. This captures SetCover when $f$ is a coverage…
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…
Supervised matrix factorization (SMF) is a classical machine learning method that simultaneously seeks feature extraction and classification tasks, which are not necessarily a priori aligned objectives. Our goal is to use SMF to learn…
Minimizing the difference of two submodular (DS) functions is a problem that naturally occurs in various machine learning problems. Although it is well known that a DS problem can be equivalently formulated as the minimization of the…
In this paper, we propose a new Fully Composite Formulation of convex optimization problems. It includes, as a particular case, the problems with functional constraints, max-type minimization problems, and problems of Composite…
The Maximum Common Subgraph (MCS) problem plays a key role in many applications, including cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and pattern recognition, where it is used to identify the largest shared substructure between two graphs. Although…
The problem of maximizing a constrained monotone set function has many practical applications and generalizes many combinatorial problems. Unfortunately, it is generally not possible to maximize a monotone set function up to an acceptable…
Dynamic feature selection (DFS) is a machine learning framework in which features are acquired sequentially for individual samples under budget constraints. The exponential growth in the number of possible feature acquisition paths forces a…
We study a general class of convex submodular optimization problems with indicator variables. Many applications such as the problem of inferring Markov random fields (MRFs) with a sparsity or robustness prior can be naturally modeled in…
In this paper, we consider the optimization problem \scpl (\scp), which is to find a minimum cost subset of a ground set $U$ such that the value of a submodular function $f$ is above a threshold $\tau$. In contrast to most existing work on…
Randomization is a fundamental tool used in many theoretical and practical areas of computer science. We study here the role of randomization in the area of submodular function maximization. In this area most algorithms are randomized, and…
The Frank-Wolfe (FW) method is a popular algorithm for solving large-scale convex optimization problems appearing in structured statistical learning. However, the traditional Frank-Wolfe method can only be applied when the feasible region…
High-order tensor methods that employ Taylor-based local models (of degree $p\ge 3$) within adaptive regularization frameworks have been recently proposed for both convex and nonconvex optimization problems. They have been shown to have…
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…
Chance constraints are frequently used to limit the probability of constraint violations in real-world optimization problems where the constraints involve stochastic components. We study chance-constrained submodular optimization problems,…
We study the sparse non-negative least squares (S-NNLS) problem. S-NNLS occurs naturally in a wide variety of applications where an unknown, non-negative quantity must be recovered from linear measurements. We present a unified framework…