Improved Inapproximability For Submodular Maximization

Abstract: We show that it is Unique Games-hard to approximate the maximum of a submodular function to within a factor 0.695, and that it is Unique Games-hard to approximate the maximum of a symmetric submodular function to within a factor 0.739. These results slightly improve previous results by Feige, Mirrokni and Vondr\'ak (FOCS 2007) who showed that these problems are NP-hard to approximate to within $3/4 + \epsilon \approx 0.750$ and $5/6 + \epsilon \approx 0.833$, respectively.