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Budget-Smoothed Analysis for Submodular Maximization

Authors Aviad Rubinstein, Junyao Zhao

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Author Details

Aviad Rubinstein
  • Computer Science Department, Stanford University, CA, USA
Junyao Zhao
  • Computer Science Department, Stanford University, CA, USA

Funding

  • Rubinstein, Aviad: Supported by NSF CCF-1954927, and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship.
  • Zhao, Junyao: Supported by NSF CCF-1954927.

Acknowledgements

We thank Eric Balkanski and Matt Weinberg for interesting discussions and comments on earlier drafts.

Cite As Get BibTex

Aviad Rubinstein and Junyao Zhao. Budget-Smoothed Analysis for Submodular Maximization. In 13th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 215, pp. 113:1-113:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2022.113

Abstract

The greedy algorithm for monotone submodular function maximization subject to cardinality constraint is guaranteed to approximate the optimal solution to within a 1-1/e factor. Although it is well known that this guarantee is essentially tight in the worst case - for greedy and in fact any efficient algorithm, experiments show that greedy performs better in practice. We observe that for many applications in practice, the empirical distribution of the budgets (i.e., cardinality constraints) is supported on a wide range, and moreover, all the existing hardness results in theory break under a large perturbation of the budget.
To understand the effect of the budget from both algorithmic and hardness perspectives, we introduce a new notion of budget-smoothed analysis. We prove that greedy is optimal for every budget distribution, and we give a characterization for the worst-case submodular functions. Based on these results, we show that on the algorithmic side, under realistic budget distributions, greedy and related algorithms enjoy provably better approximation guarantees, that hold even for worst-case functions, and on the hardness side, there exist hard functions that are fairly robust to all the budget distributions.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Submodular optimization and polymatroids
Keywords
  • Submodular optimization
  • Beyond worst-case analysis
  • Greedy algorithms
  • Hardness of approximation

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