In this paper we describe a new algorithm called Fast Adaptive Sequencing Technique (FAST) for maximizing a monotone submodular function under a cardinality constraint $k$ whose approximation ratio is arbitrarily close to $1-1/e$, is $O(\log(n) \log^2(\log k))$ adaptive, and uses a total of $O(n \log\log(k))$ queries. Recent algorithms have comparable guarantees in terms of asymptotic worst case analysis, but their actual number of rounds and query complexity depend on very large constants and polynomials in terms of precision and confidence, making them impractical for large data sets. Our main contribution is a design that is extremely efficient both in terms of its non-asymptotic worst case query complexity and number of rounds, and in terms of its practical runtime. We show that this algorithm outperforms any algorithm for submodular maximization we are aware of, including hyper-optimized parallel versions of state-of-the-art serial algorithms, by running experiments on large data sets. These experiments show FAST is orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art.
Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University（东北大学胡里计算机科学学院）
We study the problem of differentially private constrained maximization of decomposable submodular functions. A submodular function is decomposable if it takes the form of a sum of submodular functions. The special case of maximizing a monotone, decomposable submodular function under cardinality constraints is known as the Combinatorial Public Projects (CPP) problem [Papadimitriou et al., 2008]. Previous work by Gupta et al. [2010] gave a differentially private algorithm for the CPP problem. We extend this work by designing differentially private algorithms for both monotone and non-monotone d…
Continuous submodular functions are a category of generally non-convex/non-concave functions with a wide spectrum of applications. The celebrated property of this class of functions - continuous submodularity - enables both exact minimization and approximate maximization in poly. time. Continuous submodularity is obtained by generalizing the notion of submodularity from discrete domains to continuous domains. It intuitively captures a repulsive effect amongst different dimensions of the defined multivariate function. In this paper, we systematically study continuous submodularity and a class o…
The Open University of Israel（以色列开放大学）；Yale Institute for Network Science, Yale University（耶鲁大学网络科学研究所）；University of Haifa（海法大学）
In this paper, we propose a novel framework that converts streaming algorithms for monotone submodular maximization into streaming algorithms for non-monotone submodular maximization. This reduction readily leads to the currently tightest deterministic approximation ratio for submodular maximization subject to a $k$-matchoid constraint. Moreover, we propose the first streaming algorithm for monotone submodular maximization subject to $k$-extendible and $k$-set system constraints. Together with our proposed reduction, we obtain $O(k\log k)$ and $O(k^2\log k)$ approximation ratio for submodular …
In this paper, we study the non-monotone adaptive submodular maximization problem subject to a knapsack and a $k$-system constraints. The input of our problem is a set of items, where each item has a particular state drawn from a known prior distribution. However, the state of an item is initially unknown, one must select an item in order to reveal the state of that item. There is a utility function which is defined over items and states. Our objective is to sequentially select a group of items to maximize the expected utility. Although the cardinality-constrained non-monotone adaptive submodu…
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
In this paper, we propose three online algorithms for submodular maximisation. The first one, Mono-Frank-Wolfe, reduces the number of per-function gradient evaluations from $T^{1/2}$ [Chen2018Online] and $T^{3/2}$ [chen2018projection] to 1, and achieves a $(1-1/e)$-regret bound of $O(T^{4/5})$. The second one, Bandit-Frank-Wolfe, is the first bandit algorithm for continuous DR-submodular maximization, which achieves a $(1-1/e)$-regret bound of $O(T^{8/9})$. Finally, we extend Bandit-Frank-Wolfe to a bandit algorithm for discrete submodular maximization, Responsive-Frank-Wolfe, which attains a …
Yale Institute for Network Science（耶鲁网络科学研究所）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
In this paper, we consider the problem of black box continuous submodular maximization where we only have access to the function values and no information about the derivatives is provided. For a monotone and continuous DR-submodular function, and subject to a bounded convex body constraint, we propose Black-box Continuous Greedy, a derivative-free algorithm that provably achieves the tight $[(1-1/e)OPT-ε]$ approximation guarantee with $O(d/ε^3)$ function evaluations. We then extend our result to the stochastic setting where function values are subject to stochastic zero-mean noise. It is thro…
In this paper, we study fundamental problems of maximizing DR-submodular continuous functions that have real-world applications in the domain of machine learning, economics, operations research and communication systems. It captures a subclass of non-convex optimization that provides both theoretical and practical guarantees. Here, we focus on minimizing regret for online arriving non-monotone DR-submodular functions over different types of convex sets: hypercube, down-closed and general convex sets. First, we present an online algorithm that achieves a $1/e$-approximation ratio with the regre…
Over the last two decades, submodular function maximization has been the workhorse of many discrete optimization problems in machine learning applications. Traditionally, the study of submodular functions was based on binary function properties. However, such properties have an inherit weakness, namely, if an algorithm assumes functions that have a particular property, then it provides no guarantee for functions that violate this property, even when the violation is very slight. Therefore, recent works began to consider continuous versions of function properties. Probably the most significant …
Group Equality in Adaptive Submodular Maximization
Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校纳文·金德尔管理学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学计算机科学与工程系）
Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校纳文·金德尔管理学院）
In this paper, we develop fast algorithms for two stochastic submodular maximization problems. We start with the well-studied adaptive submodular maximization problem subject to a cardinality constraint. We develop the first linear-time algorithm which achieves a $(1-1/e-ε)$ approximation ratio. Notably, the time complexity of our algorithm is $O(n\log\frac{1}ε)$ (number of function evaluations) which is independent of the cardinality constraint, where $n$ is the size of the ground set. Then we introduce the concept of fully adaptive submodularity, and develop a linear-time algorithm for maxim…
Yale Institute for Network Science, Yale University（耶鲁大学耶鲁网络科学研究所）；The Open University of Israel（以色列开放大学）
In this paper, we consider the unconstrained submodular maximization problem. We propose the first algorithm for this problem that achieves a tight $(1/2-\varepsilon)$-approximation guarantee using $\tilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ adaptive rounds and a linear number of function evaluations. No previously known algorithm for this problem achieves an approximation ratio better than $1/3$ using less than $Ω(n)$ rounds of adaptivity, where $n$ is the size of the ground set. Moreover, our algorithm easily extends to the maximization of a non-negative continuous DR-submodular function subject to a box …
We study the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a cardinality constraint $k$, with the added twist that a number of items $τ$ from the returned set may be removed. We focus on the worst-case setting considered in (Orlin et al., 2016), in which a constant-factor approximation guarantee was given for $τ= o(\sqrt{k})$. In this paper, we solve a key open problem raised therein, presenting a new Partitioned Robust (PRo) submodular maximization algorithm that achieves the same guarantee for more general $τ= o(k)$. Our algorithm constructs partitions consisting of buckets…
Mean field inference in probabilistic models is generally a highly nonconvex problem. Existing optimization methods, e.g., coordinate ascent algorithms, can only generate local optima. In this work we propose provable mean filed methods for probabilistic log-submodular models and its posterior agreement (PA) with strong approximation guarantees. The main algorithmic technique is a new Double Greedy scheme, termed DR-DoubleGreedy, for continuous DR-submodular maximization with box-constraints. It is a one-pass algorithm with linear time complexity, reaching the optimal 1/2 approximation ratio, …
In this paper, we propose the first continuous optimization algorithms that achieve a constant factor approximation guarantee for the problem of monotone continuous submodular maximization subject to a linear constraint. We first prove that a simple variant of the vanilla coordinate ascent, called Coordinate-Ascent+, achieves a $(\frac{e-1}{2e-1}-\varepsilon)$-approximation guarantee while performing $O(n/\varepsilon)$ iterations, where the computational complexity of each iteration is roughly $O(n/\sqrt{\varepsilon}+n\log n)$ (here, $n$ denotes the dimension of the optimization problem). We t…
In this paper, we introduce a novel technique for constrained submodular maximization, inspired by barrier functions in continuous optimization. This connection not only improves the running time for constrained submodular maximization but also provides the state of the art guarantee. More precisely, for maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to the combination of a $k$-matchoid and $\ell$-knapsack constraint (for $\ell\leq k$), we propose a potential function that can be approximately minimized. Once we minimize the potential function up to an $ε$ error it is guaranteed that we hav…
Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校纳文·金达尔管理学院）
In this paper, we study the non-monotone adaptive submodular maximization problem subject to a cardinality constraint. We first revisit the adaptive random greedy algorithm proposed in \citep{gotovos2015non}, where they show that this algorithm achieves a $1/e$ approximation ratio if the objective function is adaptive submodular and pointwise submodular. It is not clear whether the same guarantee holds under adaptive submodularity (without resorting to pointwise submodularity) or not. Our first contribution is to show that the adaptive random greedy algorithm achieves a $1/e$ approximation rat…
Graduate School of Information Sciences and Technology（信息科学与技术研究生院）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Motivated by, e.g., sensitivity analysis and end-to-end learning, the demand for differentiable optimization algorithms has been significantly increasing. In this paper, we establish a theoretically guaranteed versatile framework that makes the greedy algorithm for monotone submodular function maximization differentiable. We smooth the greedy algorithm via randomization, and prove that it almost recovers original approximation guarantees in expectation for the cases of cardinality and $κ$-extensible system constrains. We also show how to efficiently compute unbiased gradient estimators of any …
Submodular continuous functions are a category of (generally) non-convex/non-concave functions with a wide spectrum of applications. We characterize these functions and demonstrate that they can be maximized efficiently with approximation guarantees. Specifically, i) We introduce the weak DR property that gives a unified characterization of submodularity for all set, integer-lattice and continuous functions; ii) for maximizing monotone DR-submodular continuous functions under general down-closed convex constraints, we propose a Frank-Wolfe variant with $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee, and su…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
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 $1/2 -ε$ approximation using $O(\log(1/ε) / ε)$ parallel rounds of function evaluations. Our algorithm is based on a continuous variant of the double greedy algorithm of Buchbinder et al. that achieves the optimal $1/2$ approximation in the sequential setting. Our algorithm applies more generally to the problem of maximizing a continuous diminishing-returns (DR) function.
In this paper we study the fundamental problems of maximizing a continuous non-monotone submodular function over the hypercube, both with and without coordinate-wise concavity. This family of optimization problems has several applications in machine learning, economics, and communication systems. Our main result is the first $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation algorithm for continuous submodular function maximization; this approximation factor of $\frac{1}{2}$ is the best possible for algorithms that only query the objective function at polynomially many points. For the special case of DR-submodular m…
Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University（东北大学胡里计算机科学学院）
In this work, we study the problem of privately maximizing a submodular function in the streaming setting. Extensive work has been done on privately maximizing submodular functions in the general case when the function depends upon the private data of individuals. However, when the size of the data stream drawn from the domain of the objective function is large or arrives very fast, one must privately optimize the objective within the constraints of the streaming setting. We establish fundamental differentially private baselines for this problem and then derive better trade-offs between privac…
MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Google Zurich（谷歌苏黎世）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Submodular maximization has become established as the method of choice for the task of selecting representative and diverse summaries of data. However, if datapoints have sensitive attributes such as gender or age, such machine learning algorithms, left unchecked, are known to exhibit bias: under- or over-representation of particular groups. This has made the design of fair machine learning algorithms increasingly important. In this work we address the question: Is it possible to create fair summaries for massive datasets? To this end, we develop the first streaming approximation algorithms fo…
Practical Parallel Algorithms for Non-Monotone Submodular Maximization
School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Soochow University（苏州大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Qingdao University of Science and Technology（青岛科技大学）
Submodular maximization problems belong to the family of combinatorial optimization problems and enjoy wide applications. In this paper, we focus on the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a $d$-knapsack constraint, for which we propose a streaming algorithm that achieves a $\left(\frac{1}{1+2d}-ε\right)$-approximation of the optimal value, while it only needs one single pass through the dataset without storing all the data in the memory. In our experiments, we extensively evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm via two applications: news recommendation…
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；The Open University of Israel（以色列开放大学）
Submodular functions are a broad class of set functions, which naturally arise in diverse areas. Many algorithms have been suggested for the maximization of these functions. Unfortunately, once the function deviates from submodularity, the known algorithms may perform arbitrarily poorly. Amending this issue, by obtaining approximation results for set functions generalizing submodular functions, has been the focus of recent works. One such class, known as weakly submodular functions, has received a lot of attention. A key result proved by Das and Kempe (2011) showed that the approximation ratio…
Microsoft Research Cambridge（微软研究院剑桥）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
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 nature, submodular functions can be maximized approximately with strong theoretical guarantees in polynomial time. Typically, learning the submodular function and optimization of that function are treated separately, i.e. the function is first learned using a proxy objective and subsequently maximized. In contrast, we show how to perform learning and optimizati…
A variety of large-scale machine learning problems can be cast as instances of constrained submodular maximization. Existing approaches for distributed submodular maximization have a critical drawback: The capacity - number of instances that can fit in memory - must grow with the data set size. In practice, while one can provision many machines, the capacity of each machine is limited by physical constraints. We propose a truly scalable approach for distributed submodular maximization under fixed capacity. The proposed framework applies to a broad class of algorithms and constraints and provid…
Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校纳文·金达尔管理学院）
The goal of a sequential decision making problem is to design an interactive policy that adaptively selects a group of items, each selection is based on the feedback from the past, in order to maximize the expected utility of selected items. It has been shown that the utility functions of many real-world applications are adaptive submodular. However, most of existing studies on adaptive submodular optimization focus on the average-case. Unfortunately, a policy that has a good average-case performance may have very poor performance under the worst-case realization. In this study, we propose to …
In this work, we consider robust submodular maximization with matroid constraints. We give an efficient bi-criteria approximation algorithm that outputs a small family of feasible sets whose union has (nearly) optimal objective value. This algorithm theoretically performs less function calls than previous works at cost of adding more elements to the final solution. We also provide significant implementation improvements showing that our algorithm outperforms the algorithms in the existing literature. We finally assess the performance of our contributions in three real-world applications.
We study the problem of maximizing a monotone set function subject to a cardinality constraint $k$ in the setting where some number of elements $τ$ is deleted from the returned set. The focus of this work is on the worst-case adversarial setting. While there exist constant-factor guarantees when the function is submodular, there are no guarantees for non-submodular objectives. In this work, we present a new algorithm Oblivious-Greedy and prove the first constant-factor approximation guarantees for a wider class of non-submodular objectives. The obtained theoretical bounds are the first constan…
Diminishing-returns (DR) submodular optimization is an important field with many real-world applications in machine learning, economics and communication systems. It captures a subclass of non-convex optimization that provides both practical and theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we study the fundamental problem of maximizing non-monotone DR-submodular functions over down-closed and general convex sets in both offline and online settings. First, we show that for offline maximizing non-monotone DR-submodular functions over a general convex set, the Frank-Wolfe algorithm achieves an approxim…
Inference for latent feature models is inherently difficult as the inference space grows exponentially with the size of the input data and number of latent features. In this work, we use Kurihara & Welling (2008)'s maximization-expectation framework to perform approximate MAP inference for linear-Gaussian latent feature models with an Indian Buffet Process (IBP) prior. This formulation yields a submodular function of the features that corresponds to a lower bound on the model evidence. By adding a constant to this function, we obtain a nonnegative submodular function that can be maximized via …
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Yahoo Research（雅虎研究院）
We propose a new random pruning method (called "submodular sparsification (SS)") to reduce the cost of submodular maximization. The pruning is applied via a "submodularity graph" over the $n$ ground elements, where each directed edge is associated with a pairwise dependency defined by the submodular function. In each step, SS prunes a $1-1/\sqrt{c}$ (for $c>1$) fraction of the nodes using weights on edges computed based on only a small number ($O(\log n)$) of randomly sampled nodes. The algorithm requires $\log_{\sqrt{c}}n$ steps with a small and highly parallelizable per-step computation. An …
Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；National Institute of Informatics（信息科学研究所）
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. Many machine learning problems, including data summarization and influence maximization, can be naturally modeled as the problem of maximizing monotone submodular functions. However, when such applications involve sensitive data about individuals, their privacy concerns should be addressed. In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing monotone submodular f…
Can we efficiently extract useful information from a large user-generated dataset while protecting the privacy of the users and/or ensuring fairness in representation. We cast this problem as an instance of a deletion-robust submodular maximization where part of the data may be deleted due to privacy concerns or fairness criteria. We propose the first memory-efficient centralized, streaming, and distributed methods with constant-factor approximation guarantees against any number of adversarial deletions. We extensively evaluate the performance of our algorithms against prior state-of-the-art o…
Open University of Israel（以色列开放大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
In this paper, we develop the first one-pass streaming algorithm for submodular maximization that does not evaluate the entire stream even once. By carefully subsampling each element of data stream, our algorithm enjoys the tightest approximation guarantees in various settings while having the smallest memory footprint and requiring the lowest number of function evaluations. More specifically, for a monotone submodular function and a $p$-matchoid constraint, our randomized algorithm achieves a $4p$ approximation ratio (in expectation) with $O(k)$ memory and $O(km/p)$ queries per element ($k$ i…
Yale Institute for Network Science（耶鲁网络科学研究所）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Expedia Group（亿客行集团）；University of Haifa（海法大学）
In this paper, we propose scalable methods for maximizing a regularized submodular function $f = g - \ell$ expressed as the difference between a monotone submodular function $g$ and a modular function $\ell$. Indeed, submodularity is inherently related to the notions of diversity, coverage, and representativeness. In particular, finding the mode of many popular probabilistic models of diversity, such as determinantal point processes, submodular probabilistic models, and strongly log-concave distributions, involves maximization of (regularized) submodular functions. Since a regularized function…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
For many optimization problems in machine learning, finding an optimal solution is computationally intractable and we seek algorithms that perform well in practice. Since computational intractability often results from pathological instances, we look for methods to benchmark the performance of algorithms against optimal solutions on real-world instances. The main challenge is that an optimal solution cannot be efficiently computed for intractable problems, and we therefore often do not know how far a solution is from being optimal. A major question is therefore how to measure the performance o…
University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学）；University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）
Maximizing a submodular function has a wide range of applications in machine learning and data mining. One such application is data summarization whose goal is to select a small set of representative and diverse data items from a large dataset. However, data items might have sensitive attributes such as race or gender, in this setting, it is important to design \emph{fairness-aware} algorithms to mitigate potential algorithmic bias that may cause over- or under- representation of particular groups. Motivated by that, we propose and study the classic non-monotone submodular maximization problem…
Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校纳文·金德尔管理学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of North Texas（北得克萨斯大学计算机科学与工程系）
Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校纳文·金达尔管理学院）；Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校计算机科学系）
In this paper, we propose and study the cascade submodular maximization problem under the adaptive setting. The input of our problem is a set of items, each item is in a particular state (i.e., the marginal contribution of an item) which is drawn from a known probability distribution. However, we can not know its actual state before selecting it. As compared with existing studies on stochastic submodular maximization, one unique setting of our problem is that each item is associated with a continuation probability which represents the probability that one is allowed to continue to select the n…
University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学）
Many sequential decision making problems, including pool-based active learning and adaptive viral marketing, can be formulated as an adaptive submodular maximization problem. Most of existing studies on adaptive submodular optimization focus on either monotone case or non-monotone case. Specifically, if the utility function is monotone and adaptive submodular, \cite{golovin2011adaptive} developed a greedy policy that achieves a $(1-1/e)$ approximation ratio subject to a cardinality constraint. If the utility function is non-monotone and adaptive submodular, \cite{tang2021beyond} showed that a …
We consider the problem of monotone, submodular maximization over a ground set of size $n$ subject to cardinality constraint $k$. For this problem, we introduce the first deterministic algorithms with linear time complexity; these algorithms are streaming algorithms. Our single-pass algorithm obtains a constant ratio in $\lceil n / c \rceil + c$ oracle queries, for any $c \ge 1$. In addition, we propose a deterministic, multi-pass streaming algorithm with a constant number of passes that achieves nearly the optimal ratio with linear query and time complexities. We prove a lower bound that impl…
University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）
Optimization problems with set submodular objective functions have many real-world applications. In discrete scenarios, where the same item can be selected more than once, the domain is generalized from a 2-element set to a bounded integer lattice. In this work, we consider the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function on the bounded integer lattice subject to a cardinality constraint. In particular, we focus on maximizing DR-submodular functions, i.e., functions defined on the integer lattice that exhibit the diminishing returns property. Given any epsilon > 0, we present a randomi…
Sharif University（谢里夫大学）；Max Planck Institute for Software Systems（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）
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 the greedy algorithm, they are only applicable to simple cardinality constraints. In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing a non-submodular nondecreasing set function subject to a general matroid constraint. We first show that the standard greedy algorithm offers an approximation factor of $\frac{0.4 γ^{2}}{\sqrt{γr} + 1}$, where $γ$ is the submodu…
University of Warwick（华威大学）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）
A wide variety of problems in machine learning, including exemplar clustering, document summarization, and sensor placement, can be cast as constrained submodular maximization problems. A lot of recent effort has been devoted to developing distributed algorithms for these problems. However, these results suffer from high number of rounds, suboptimal approximation ratios, or both. We develop a framework for bringing existing algorithms in the sequential setting to the distributed setting, achieving near optimal approximation ratios for many settings in only a constant number of MapReduce rounds…
We investigate the performance of the standard Greedy algorithm for cardinality constrained maximization of non-submodular nondecreasing set functions. While there are strong theoretical guarantees on the performance of Greedy for maximizing submodular functions, there are few guarantees for non-submodular ones. However, Greedy enjoys strong empirical performance for many important non-submodular functions, e.g., the Bayesian A-optimality objective in experimental design. We prove theoretical guarantees supporting the empirical performance. Our guarantees are characterized by a combination of …
DR-submodular continuous functions are important objectives with wide real-world applications spanning MAP inference in determinantal point processes (DPPs), and mean-field inference for probabilistic submodular models, amongst others. DR-submodularity captures a subclass of non-convex functions that enables both exact minimization and approximate maximization in polynomial time. In this work we study the problem of maximizing non-monotone DR-submodular continuous functions under general down-closed convex constraints. We start by investigating geometric properties that underlie such objective…
Submodular functions have applications throughout machine learning, but in many settings, we do not have direct access to the underlying function $f$. We focus on stochastic functions that are given as an expectation of functions over a distribution $P$. In practice, we often have only a limited set of samples $f_i$ from $P$. The standard approach indirectly optimizes $f$ by maximizing the sum of $f_i$. However, this ignores generalization to the true (unknown) distribution. In this paper, we achieve better performance on the actual underlying function $f$ by directly optimizing a combination …
KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）
We investigate the problem of unconstrained combinatorial multi-armed bandits with full-bandit feedback and stochastic rewards for submodular maximization. Previous works investigate the same problem assuming a submodular and monotone reward function. In this work, we study a more general problem, i.e., when the reward function is not necessarily monotone, and the submodularity is assumed only in expectation. We propose Randomized Greedy Learning (RGL) algorithm and theoretically prove that it achieves a $\frac{1}{2}$-regret upper bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n T^{\frac{2}{3}})$ for horizon $…
