Sensitivity Analysis of Submodular Function Maximization

We study the recently introduced idea of worst-case sensitivity for monotone submodular maximization with cardinality constraint $k$, which captures the degree to which the output argument changes on deletion of an element in the input. We find that for large classes of algorithms that non-trivial sensitivity of $o(k)$ is not possible, even with bounded curvature, and that these results also hold in the distributed framework. However, we also show that in the regime $k = Ω(n)$ that we can obtain $O(1)$ sensitivity for sufficiently low curvature.