Continuous Methods for Submodular Maximization

January 27, 2012
Roy Schwartz | Technion

The study of combinatorial problems with a submodular objective function has attracted much attention in recent years, and is partly motivated by the importance of such problems to economics, algorithmic game theory and combinatorial optimization. In addition to the fact that it is common for utility functions in economics and algorithmic game theory to be submodular, such functions also play a major role in combinatorics, graph theory and combinatorial optimization. A partial list of well-known problems captured by submodular maximization includes: Max-Cut, Max-DiCut, Max-k-Cover, Generalized-Assignment, several variants of Max-SAT and some welfare and scheduling problems.

Classical works on submodular maximization problems are mostly combinatorial in nature. Recently, however, many results based on continuous algorithmic tools have emerged. The main bottleneck in the continuous approach is how to approximately solve a non-convex relaxation for the submodular problem at hand. A simple and elegant method, called “continuous greedy”, successfully tackles this issue for monotone submodular objective functions, however, only much more complex tools are known to work for general non-monotone submodular objectives. We present a new unified continuous greedy algorithm which finds approximate fractional solutions for both the non-monotone and monotone cases, and improves on the approximation ratio for various applications. Some notable immediate implications are information-theoretic tight approximations for Submodular Max-SAT and Submodular-Welfare with k players, for any number of players k, and an improved (1/e)-approximation for maximizing a non-monotone submodular function subject to a matroid or O(1)-knapsack constraints.

We show that continuous methods can be further used to obtain improved results in other settings.
Perhaps the most basic submodular maximization problem is the problem of Unconstrained Submodular Maximization, which captures some well-studied problems, such as: Max-Cut, Max-DiCut, and some variants of maximum facility location and Max-SAT. Exploiting some symmetry properties of the problem, we present a simple information-theoretic tight (1/2)-approximation algorithm, which unlike previous known algorithms keeps a fractional inner state, i.e., it is based on a continuous approach. We note that our algorithm can be further simplified to obtain a purely combinatorial algorithm which runs only in linear time.

Speaker Details

Roy Schwartz is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, working under the supervision of Prof. Seffi Naor. Roy’s main research interests lie in the theory of algorithms, specifically, coping with NP-hard problems. He is interested in the applications of metric methods, probabilistic tools, and continuous approaches to the design and analysis of algorithms. Two main lines of research that Roy has been pursuing in the last few years are various questions related to graph partitioning and submodular optimization.