An optimal monotone contention resolution scheme for bipartite matchings via a polyhedral viewpoint

Relaxation and rounding approaches became a standard and extremely versatile tool for constrained submodular function maximization. One of the most common rounding techniques in this context are contention resolution schemes. Such schemes round a fractional point by first rounding each coordinate independently, and then dropping some elements to reach a feasible set. Also the second step, where elements are dropped, is typically randomized. This leads to an additional source of randomization within the procedure, which can complicate the analysis. We suggest a different, polyhedral viewpoint to design contention resolution schemes, which avoids to deal explicitly with the randomization in the second step. This is achieved by focusing on the marginals of a dropping procedure. Apart from avoiding one source of randomization, our viewpoint allows for employing polyhedral techniques. Both can significantly simplify the construction and analysis of contention resolution schemes. We show how, through our framework, one can obtain an optimal monotone contention resolution scheme for bipartite matchings, which has a balancedness of 0.4762. So far, only very few results are known about optimality of monotone contention resolution schemes. Our contention resolution scheme for the bipartite case also improves the lower bound on the correlation gap for bipartite matchings. Furthermore, we derive a monotone contention resolution scheme for matchings that significantly improves over the previously best one. More precisely, we obtain a balancedness of 0.4326, improving on a prior 0.1997-balanced scheme. At the same time, our scheme implies that the currently best lower bound on the correlation gap for matchings is not tight. Our results lead to improved approximation factors for various constrained submodular function maximization problems over a combination of matching constraints with further constraints.

A fast double greedy algorithm for non-monotone DR-submodular function maximization

We study the problem of maximizing non-monotone diminish return (DR)-submodular function on the bounded integer lattice, which is a generalization of submodular set function. DR-submodular functions consider the case that we can choose multiple copies for each element in the ground set. This generalization has many applications in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a [Formula: see text]-approximation algorithm with a running time of [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the size of the ground set, [Formula: see text] is the upper bound of integer lattice. Discovering important properties of DR-submodular function, we propose a fast double greedy algorithm which improves the running time.