This paper sheds a new light on submodular function minimization and maximization from the viewpoint of discrete convex analysis. L-convex functions and M-concave functions constitute subclasses of submodular functions on an integer interval. Whereas L-convex functions can be minimized efficiently on the basis of submodular (set) function minimization algorithms, M-concave functions are identif...

It is well-known that a greedy approximation with an integer-valued polymatroid potential function f is H(γ )-approximation of the minimum submodular cover problem with linear cost where γ is the maximum value of f over all singletons and H(γ ) is the γ -th harmonic number. In this paper, we establish similar results for the minimum submodular cover problem with a submodular cost (possibly nonl...

The submodular knapsack set is the discrete lower level set of a submodular function. The modular case reduces to the classical linear 0-1 knapsack set. One motivation for studying the submodular knapsack polytope is to address 0-1 programming problems with uncertain coefficients. Under various assumptions, a probabilistic constraint on 0-1 variables can be modeled as a submodular knapsack set....

A number of discrete and continuous optimization problems in machine learning are related to convex minimization problems under submodular constraints. In this paper, we deal with a submodular function with a directed graph structure, and we show that a wide range of convex optimization problems under submodular constraints can be solved much more efficiently than general submodular optimizatio...

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 entropy sampling, and maximum facility location problems. Unlike submodular minimization, submodular maximization is NP-hard. In this paper, we give the firs...

Submodular functions are discrete functions that model laws of diminishing returns and enjoy numerous algorithmic applications. They have been used in many areas, including combinatorial optimization, machine learning, and economics. In this work we study submodular functions from a learning theoretic angle. We provide algorithms for learning submodular functions, as well as lower bounds on the...

We introduce a class of discrete point processes that we call the Submodular Point Processes (SPPs). These processes are characterized via a submodular (or supermodular) function, and naturally model notions of information, coverage and diversity, as well as cooperation. Unlike Log-submodular and Log-supermodular distributions (Log-SPPs) such as determinantal point processes (DPPs), SPPs are th...

Submodular functions are a central concept in combinatorial optimization. The wide collection of optimization problems involving submodular functions encompasses many important combinatorial problems, such as Min-Cut and Max-Cut in graphs, various plant location problems, etc. In the operations research literature, many heuristics, exact algorithms, and approximation algorithms have been develo...

We address the problem of image collection summarization by learning mixtures of submodular functions. Submodularity is useful for this problem since it naturally represents characteristics such as fidelity and diversity, desirable for any summary. Several previously proposed image summarization scoring methodologies, in fact, instinctively arrived at submodularity. We provide classes of submod...