Efficient Minimization of Higher Order Submodular Functions using Monotonic Boolean Functions

Submodular function minimization is a key problem in a wide variety of applications in machine learning, economics, game theory, computer vision and many others. The general solver has a complexity of $O(n^6+n^5L)$ where $L$ is the time required to evaluate the function and $n$ is the number of variables \cite{orlin09}. On the other hand, many useful applications in computer vision and machine learning applications are defined over a special subclasses of submodular functions in which that can be written as the sum of many submodular cost functions defined over cliques containing few variables. In such functions, the pseudo-Boolean (or polynomial) representation \cite{BorosH02} of these subclasses are of degree (or order, or clique size) $k$ where $k<