An Exact Solver for Maximizing a Submodular Function Subject to a Knapsack Constraint

Abstract: We study the problem of maximizing a monotone increasing submodular function over a set of weighted elements subject to a knapsack constraint. Although this problem is NP-hard, many applications require exact solutions, as approximate solutions are often insufficient in practice. To address this need, we propose an exact branch-and-bound algorithm tailored for the submodular knapsack problem and introduce several acceleration techniques to enhance its efficiency. We evaluate these techniques on instances of three benchmark problems and compare the proposed solvers to two solvers by Sakaue and Ishihata, which are considered state-of-the-art, demonstrating that the presented methods outperform the existing methods.