Streaming algorithms are generally judged by the quality of their solution, memory footprint, and computational complexity. In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function in the streaming setting with a cardinality constraint $k$. We first propose SIEVE-STREAMING++, which requires just one pass over the data, keeps only $O(k)$ elements and achieves the tight $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation guarantee. The best previously known streaming algorithms either achieve a suboptimal $\frac{1}{4}$-approximation with $\Theta(k)$ memory or the optimal $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation with $O(k\log k)$ memory. Next, we show that by buffering a small fraction of the stream and applying a careful filtering procedure, one can heavily reduce the number of adaptive computational rounds, thus substantially lowering the computational complexity of SIEVE-STREAMING++. We then generalize our results to the more challenging multi-source streaming setting. We show how one can achieve the tight $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation guarantee with $O(k)$ shared memory, while minimizing not only the rounds of computations but also the total number of communicated bits. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms on real-world data summarization tasks for multi-source streams of tweets and of YouTube videos.

In many machine learning applications, one needs to interactively select a sequence of items (e.g., recommending movies based on a user's feedback) or make sequential decisions in a certain order (e.g., guiding an agent through a series of states). Not only do sequences already pose a dauntingly large search space, but we must also take into account past observations, as well as the uncertainty of future outcomes. Without further structure, finding an optimal sequence is notoriously challenging, if not completely intractable. In this paper, we view the problem of adaptive and sequential decision making through the lens of submodularity and propose an adaptive greedy policy with strong theoretical guarantees. Additionally, to demonstrate the practical utility of our results, we run experiments on Amazon product recommendation and Wikipedia link prediction tasks.

In a nutshell, submodular functions encode an intuitive notion of diminishing returns. As a result, submodularity appears in many important machine learning tasks such as feature selection and data summarization. Although there has been a large volume of work devoted to the study of submodular functions in recent years, the vast majority of this work has been focused on algorithms that output sets, not sequences. However, in many settings, the order in which we output items can be just as important as the items themselves. To extend the notion of submodularity to sequences, we use a directed graph on the items where the edges encode the additional value of selecting items in a particular order. Existing theory is limited to the case where this underlying graph is a directed acyclic graph. In this paper, we introduce two new algorithms that provably give constant factor approximations for general graphs and hypergraphs having bounded in or out degrees. Furthermore, we show the utility of our new algorithms for real-world applications in movie recommendation, online link prediction, and the design of course sequences for MOOCs.

The sheer scale of modern datasets has resulted in a dire need for summarization techniques that can identify representative elements in a dataset. Fortunately, the vast majority of data summarization tasks satisfy an intuitive diminishing returns condition known as submodularity, which allows us to find nearly-optimal solutions in linear time. We focus on a two-stage submodular framework where the goal is to use some given training functions to reduce the ground set so that optimizing new functions (drawn from the same distribution) over the reduced set provides almost as much value as optimizing them over the entire ground set. In this paper, we develop the first streaming and distributed solutions to this problem. In addition to providing strong theoretical guarantees, we demonstrate both the utility and efficiency of our algorithms on real-world tasks including image summarization and ride-share optimization.

Many data summarization applications are captured by the general framework of submodular maximization. As a consequence, a wide range of efficient approximation algorithms have been developed. However, when such applications involve sensitive data about individuals, their privacy concerns are not automatically addressed. To remedy this problem, we propose a general and systematic study of differentially private submodular maximization. We present privacy-preserving algorithms for both monotone and non-monotone submodular maximization under cardinality, matroid, and p-extendible system constraints, with guarantees that are competitive with optimal. Along the way, we analyze a new algorithm for non-monotone submodular maximization, which is the first (even non-privately) to achieve a constant approximation ratio while running in linear time. We additionally provide two concrete experiments to validate the efficacy of these algorithms.