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Poster
From Sets to Multisets: Provable Variational Inference for Probabilistic Integer Submodular Models
Aytunc Sahin · Yatao Bian · Joachim Buhmann · Andreas Krause

Thu Jul 16 02:00 PM -- 02:45 PM & Fri Jul 17 03:00 AM -- 03:45 AM (PDT) @
in Poster Session 47 »

Submodular functions have been studied extensively in machine learning and data mining. In particular, the optimization of submodular functions over the integer lattice (integer submodular functions) has recently attracted much interest, because this domain relates naturally to many practical problem settings, such as multilabel graph cut, budget allocation and revenue maximization with discrete assignments. In contrast, the use of these functions for probabilistic modeling has received surprisingly little attention so far. In this work, we firstly propose the Generalized Multilinear Extension, a continuous DR-submodular extension for integer submodular functions. We study central properties of this extension and formulate a new probabilistic model which is defined through integer submodular functions. Then, we introduce a block-coordinate ascent algorithm to perform approximate inference for this class of models and finally, we demonstrate its effectiveness and viability on several real-world social connection graph datasets with integer submodular objectives.

Keywords: Approximate Inference · Non-convex Optimization · Probabilistic Inference - Approximate, Monte Carlo, and Spectral Methods

Author Information

Aytunc Sahin (ETH Zurich)
Yatao Bian (Tencent AI Lab)
Joachim Buhmann (ETH Zurich)
Andreas Krause (ETH Zurich)
Andreas Krause

Andreas Krause is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Learning & Adaptive Systems Group. He also serves as Academic Co-Director of the Swiss Data Science Center and Chair of the ETH AI Center, and co-founded the ETH spin-off LatticeFlow. Before that he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Caltech. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (2008) and his Diplom in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Technical University of Munich, Germany (2004). He is a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, an ELLIS Fellow, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow and a Kavli Frontiers Fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences. He received the Rössler Prize, ERC Starting Investigator and ERC Consolidator grants, the German Pattern Recognition Award, an NSF CAREER award as well as the ETH Golden Owl teaching award. His research has received awards at several premier conferences and journals, including the ACM SIGKDD Test of Time award 2019 and the ICML Test of Time award 2020. Andreas Krause served as Program Co-Chair for ICML 2018, and currently serves as General Chair for ICML 2023 and as Action Editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research.

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