Guess free maximization of submodular and linear sums

We consider the problem of maximizing the sum of a monotone submodular function and a linear function subject to a general solvable polytope constraint. Recently, Sviridenko et al. [16] described an algorithm for this problem whose approximation guarantee is optimal in some intuitive and formal senses. Unfortunately, this algorithm involves a guessing step which makes it less clean and significantly affects its time complexity. In this work we describe a clean alternative algorithm that uses a novel weighting technique in order to avoid the problematic guessing step while keeping the same approximation guarantee as the algorithm of [16].