Submodular + Concave

Siddharth Mitra, Moran Feldman, Amin Karbasi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

It has been well established that first order optimization methods can converge to the maximal objective value of concave functions and provide constant factor approximation guarantees for (non-convex/non-concave) continuous submodular functions. In this work, we initiate the study of the maximization of functions of the form F(x) = G(x) + C(x) over a solvable convex body P, where G is a smooth DR-submodular function and C is a smooth concave function. This class of functions is a strict extension of both concave and continuous DR-submodular functions for which no theoretical guarantee is known. We provide a suite of Frank-Wolfe style algorithms, which, depending on the nature of the objective function (i.e., if G and C are monotone or not, and non-negative or not) and on the nature of the set P (i.e., whether it is downward closed or not), provide 1−1/e, 1/e, or 1/2 approximation guarantees. We then use our algorithms to get a framework to smoothly interpolate between choosing a diverse set of elements from a given ground set (corresponding to the mode of a determinantal point process) and choosing a clustered set of elements (corresponding to the maxima of a suitable concave function). Additionally, we apply our algorithms to various functions in the above class (DR-submodular + concave) in both constrained and unconstrained settings, and show that our algorithms consistently outperform natural baselines.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 - 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021
EditorsMarc'Aurelio Ranzato, Alina Beygelzimer, Yann Dauphin, Percy S. Liang, Jenn Wortman Vaughan
PublisherNeural information processing systems foundation
Pages11577-11591
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781713845393
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 6 Dec 202114 Dec 2021

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume14
ISSN (Print)1049-5258

Conference

Conference35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period6/12/2114/12/21

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Neural information processing systems foundation. All rights reserved.

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