Related papers: CMA-ES with Two-Point Step-Size Adaptation

One of the most challenging types of ill-posedness in global optimization is the presence of insensitivity regions in design parameter space, so the identification of their shape will be crucial, if ill-posedness is irrecoverable. Such…

The Increasing Population Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (IPOP-CMA-ES) algorithm is a reference stochastic optimizer dedicated to blackbox optimization, where no prior knowledge about the underlying problem structure is…

Contextual policy search (CPS) is a class of multi-task reinforcement learning algorithms that is particularly useful for robotic applications. A recent state-of-the-art method is Contextual Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategies…

We focus on the challenge of finding a diverse collection of quality solutions on complex continuous domains. While quality diver-sity (QD) algorithms like Novelty Search with Local Competition (NSLC) and MAP-Elites are designed to generate…

In the field of evolutionary computation, one of the most challenging topics is algorithm selection. Knowing which heuristics to use for which optimization problem is key to obtaining high-quality solutions. We aim to extend this research…

We present a novel black box optimization algorithm called Hessian Estimation Evolution Strategy. The algorithm updates the covariance matrix of its sampling distribution by directly estimating the curvature of the objective function. This…

Outline of several strategies for using Gaussian processes as surrogate models for the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES).

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a highly popular model-free reinforcement learning (RL) approach. However, we observe that in a continuous action space, PPO can prematurely shrink the exploration variance, which leads to slow progress…

Parameter-efficient tuning aims at updating only a small subset of parameters when adapting a pretrained model to downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce PASTA, in which we only modify the special token representations (e.g., [SEP] and…

Matching methods are widely used to reduce confounding effects in observational studies, but conventional approaches often treat all covariates as equally important, which can result in poor performance when covariates differ in their…

In this study, we consider a continuous min--max optimization problem $\min_{x \in \mathbb{X} \max_{y \in \mathbb{Y}}}f(x,y)$ whose objective function is a black-box. We propose a novel approach to minimize the worst-case objective function…

This paper focuses on the restart strategy of CMA-ES on multi-modal functions. A first alternative strategy proceeds by decreasing the initial step-size of the mutation while doubling the population size at each restart. A second strategy…

Test-time policy adaptation for multi-turn interactions (T2PAM) is essential for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with dynamic user needs during inference time. However, existing paradigms commonly treat test-time adaptation as a…

The mutation strength adaptation properties of a multi-recombinative $(\mu/\mu_I, \lambda)$-ES are studied for isotropic mutations. To this end, standard implementations of cumulative step-size adaptation (CSA) and mutative self-adaptation…

The performance of deep neural networks, such as Deep Belief Networks formed by Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), strongly depends on their training, which is the process of adjusting their parameters. This process can be posed as an…

Evolutionary optimization algorithms often face defects and limitations that complicate the evolution processes or even prevent them from reaching the global optimum. A notable constraint pertains to the considerable quantity of function…

The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is a stochastic search algorithm using a multivariate normal distribution for continuous black-box optimization. In addition to strong empirical results, part of the CMA-ES can be…

Water distribution system design is a challenging optimisation problem with a high number of search dimensions and constraints. In this way, Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been widely applied to optimise WDS to minimise cost subject…

Recently it was shown by Nesterov (2011) that techniques form convex optimization can be used to successfully accelerate simple derivative-free randomized optimization methods. The appeal of those schemes lies in their low complexity, which…

The interest in accelerating black-box optimizers has resulted in several surrogate model-assisted version of the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy, a state-of-the-art continuous black-box optimizer. The version called…