Supermodularity and Affine Policies in Dynamic Robust Optimization

This paper considers robust dynamic optimization problems, where the unknown parameters are modeled as uncertainty sets. We seek to bridge two classical paradigms for solving such problems, namely (1) Dynamic Programming (DP), and (2) policies parameterized in model uncertainties (also known as decision rules), obtained by solving tractable convex optimization problems. We provide a set … Read more

Maximizing Non-monotone Submodular Functions under Matroid and Knapsack Constraints

Submodular function maximization is a central problem in combinatorial optimization, generalizing many important problems including Max Cut in directed/undirected graphs and in hypergraphs, certain constraint satisfaction problems, maximum entropy sampling, and maximum facility location problems. Unlike submodular minimization, submodular maximization is NP-hard. In this paper, we give the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for maximizing any … Read more