No Arabic abstract
This paper describes a simple greedy D-approximation algorithm for any covering problem whose objective function is submodular and non-decreasing, and whose feasible region can be expressed as the intersection of arbitrary (closed upwards) covering constraints, each of which constrains at most D variables of the problem. (A simple example is Vertex Cover, with D = 2.) The algorithm generalizes previous approximation algorithms for fundamental covering problems and online paging and caching problems.
Motivated by applications in machine learning, such as subset selection and data summarization, we consider the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to mixed packing and covering constraints. We present a tight approximation algorithm that for any constant $epsilon >0$ achieves a guarantee of $1-frac{1}{mathrm{e}}-epsilon$ while violating only the covering constraints by a multiplicative factor of $1-epsilon$. Our algorithm is based on a novel enumeration method, which unlike previous known enumeration techniques, can handle both packing and covering constraints. We extend the above main result by additionally handling a matroid independence constraints as well as finding (approximate) pareto set optimal solutions when multiple submodular objectives are present. Finally, we propose a novel and purely combinatorial dynamic programming approach that can be applied to several special cases of the problem yielding not only {em deterministic} but also considerably faster algorithms. For example, for the well studied special case of only packing constraints (Kulik {em et. al.} [Math. Oper. Res. `13] and Chekuri {em et. al.} [FOCS `10]), we are able to present the first deterministic non-trivial approximation algorithm. We believe our new combinatorial approach might be of independent interest.
We design new serial and parallel approximation algorithms for computing a maximum weight $b$-matching in an edge-weighted graph with a submodular objective function. This problem is NP-hard; the new algorithms have approximation ratio $1/3$, and are relaxations of the Greedy algorithm that rely only on local information in the graph, making them parallelizable. We have designed and implemented Local Lazy Greedy algorithms for both serial and parallel computers. We have applied the approximate submodular $b$-matching algorithm to assign tasks to processors in the computation of Fock matrices in quantum chemistry on parallel computers. The assignment seeks to reduce the run time by balancing the computational load on the processors and bounding the number of messages that each processor sends. We show that the new assignment of tasks to processors provides a four fold speedup over the currently used assignment in the NWChemEx software on $8000$ processors on the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab.
In a minimum cost submodular cover problem (MinSMC), given a monotone non-decreasing submodular function $fcolon 2^V rightarrow mathbb{Z}^+$, a cost function $c: Vrightarrow mathbb R^{+}$, an integer $kleq f(V)$, the goal is to find a subset $Asubseteq V$ with the minimum cost such that $f(A)geq k$. MinSMC has a lot of applications in machine learning and data mining. In this paper, we design a parallel algorithm for MinSMC which obtains a solution with approximation ratio at most $frac{H(min{Delta,k})}{1-5varepsilon}$ with probability $1-3varepsilon$ in $O(frac{log mlog nlog^2 mn}{varepsilon^4})$ rounds, where $Delta=max_{vin V}f(v)$, $H(cdot)$ is the Hamornic number, $n=f(V)$, $m=|V|$ and $varepsilon$ is a constant in $(0,frac{1}{5})$. This is the first paper obtaining a parallel algorithm for the weighted version of the MinSMC problem with an approximation ratio arbitrarily close to $H(min{Delta,k})$.
Many algorithms for maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a knapsack constraint rely on the natural greedy heuristic. We present a novel refined analysis of this greedy heuristic which enables us to: $(1)$ reduce the enumeration in the tight $(1-e^{-1})$-approximation of [Sviridenko 04] from subsets of size three to two; $(2)$ present an improved upper bound of $0.42945$ for the classic algorithm which returns the better between a single element and the output of the greedy heuristic.
We study the problem of maximizing a non-monotone submodular function subject to a cardinality constraint in the streaming model. Our main contribution is a single-pass (semi-)streaming algorithm that uses roughly $O(k / varepsilon^2)$ memory, where $k$ is the size constraint. At the end of the stream, our algorithm post-processes its data structure using any offline algorithm for submodular maximization, and obtains a solution whose approximation guarantee is $frac{alpha}{1+alpha}-varepsilon$, where $alpha$ is the approximation of the offline algorithm. If we use an exact (exponential time) post-processing algorithm, this leads to $frac{1}{2}-varepsilon$ approximation (which is nearly optimal). If we post-process with the algorithm of Buchbinder and Feldman (Math of OR 2019), that achieves the state-of-the-art offline approximation guarantee of $alpha=0.385$, we obtain $0.2779$-approximation in polynomial time, improving over the previously best polynomial-time approximation of $0.1715$ due to Feldman et al. (NeurIPS 2018). It is also worth mentioning that our algorithm is combinatorial and deterministic, which is rare for an algorithm for non-monotone submodular maximization, and enjoys a fast update time of $O(frac{log k + log (1/alpha)}{varepsilon^2})$ per element.