Parallel black-box optimization of expensive high-dimensional multimodal functions via magnitude

Building on the recently developed theory of magnitude, we introduce the optimization algorithm EXPLO2 and carefully benchmark it. EXPLO2 advances the state of the art for optimizing high-dimensional ($D \gtrapprox 40$) multimodal functions that are expensive to compute and for which derivatives are not available, such as arise in hyperparameter optimization or via simulations.