Constrained submodular maximization problems have long been studied, most recently in the context of auctions and computational advertising, with near-optimal results known under a variety of constraints when the submodular function is monotone. The case of non-monotone submodular maximization is less well understood: the first approximation algorithms even for the unconstrained setting were given by Feige et al. (FOCS '07). More recently, Lee et al. (STOC '09, APPROX '09) show how to approximately maximize non-monotone submodular functions when the constraints are given by the intersection of p matroid constraints; their algorithm is based on local-search procedures that consider p-swaps, and hence the running time may be n Ω(p) , implying their algorithm is polynomial-time only for constantly many matroids. In this paper, we give algorithms that work for p-independence systems (which generalize constraints given by the intersection of p matroids), where the running time is poly(n, p). Both our algorithms and analyses are simple: our algorithm essentially reduces the non-monotone maximization problem to multiple runs of the greedy algorithm previously used in the monotone case. Our idea of using existing algorithms for monotone functions to solve the non-monotone case also works for maximizing a submodular function with respect to a knapsack constraint: we get a simple greedy-based constant-factor approximation for this problem. With these simpler algorithms, we are able to adapt our approach to constrained non-monotone submodular maximization to the (online) secretary setting, where elements arrive one at a time in random order, and the algorithm must make irrevocable decisions about whether or not to select each element as it arrives. We give constant approximations in this secretary setting when the algorithm is constrained subject to a uniform matroid or a partition matroid, and give an O(log k) approximation when it is constrained by a general matroid of rank k.
Gupta et al. REF studied the non-monotone submodular matroid maximization problem for both offline and online (secretary) versions.
Constrained Non-Monotone Submodular Maximization: Offline and Secretary Algorithms
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Mathematics Computer Science