Authors
Georgios Amanatidis
Federico Fusco
Philip Lazos
Stefano Leonardi
Alberto Marchetti-Spaccamela
Rebecca Reiffenhäuser
Date (dd-mm-yyyy)
2026-01-18
Title
Submodular maximization subject to a knapsack constraint
Subtitle
Combinatorial algorithms with near-optimal adaptive complexity
Journal
Theoretical Computer Science
Volume
1060
Publication Year
2026-01-18
Document type
Article
Abstract

Submodular maximization is a classic algorithmic problem with multiple applications in data mining and machine learning; there, the growing need to deal with massive instances motivates the design of algorithms balancing the quality of the solution with applicability. For the latter, an important measure is the adaptive complexity, which captures the number of sequential rounds of parallel computation needed by an algorithm to terminate. In this work, we obtain the first constant factor approximation algorithm for non-monotone submodular maximization subject to a knapsack constraint with near-optimal O(log n) adaptive complexity. Low adaptivity by itself, however, is not enough: a crucial feature to account for is represented by the total number of function evaluations (or value queries). Our algorithm asks O˜(n2) value queries but can be modified to run with only O˜(n), while retaining a low adaptive complexity of O(log2n). Besides the above improvement in adaptivity, this is also the first combinatorial approach with sublinear adaptive complexity for the problem and yields algorithms comparable to the state-of-the-art even for the special cases of cardinality constraints or monotone objectives.

URL
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/8f134ee4-1d05-40c3-a21c-4954c7ff9234