2024/09/09 by Jing Yuan, Shaojie Tang, Yuan, Jing +1
Computer Science · #Algorithms and Data Compression #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Data Mining Algorithms and Applications #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Natural Language Processing Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.05265
openalex publication_date 2024/09/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper addresses the problem of sequential submodular maximization: selecting and ranking items in a sequence to optimize some composite submodular function. In contrast to most of the previous works, which assume access to the utility function, we assume that we are given only a set of samples. Each sample includes a random sequence of items and its associated utility. We present an algorithm that, given polynomially many samples drawn from a two-stage uniform distribution, achieves an approximation ratio dependent on the curvature of individual submodular functions. Our results apply in a wide variety of real-world scenarios, such as ranking products in online retail platforms, where complete knowledge of the utility function is often impossible to obtain. Our algorithm gives an empirically useful solution in such contexts, thus proving that limited data can be of great use in sequencing tasks. From a technical perspective, our results extend prior work on ``optimization from samples'' by generalizing from optimizing a set function to a sequence-dependent function.