Related papers: Analysis of a Natural Gradient Algorithm on Monoto…
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…
This paper presents a novel mechanism to adapt surrogate-assisted population-based algorithms. This mechanism is applied to ACM-ES, a recently proposed surrogate-assisted variant of CMA-ES. The resulting algorithm, saACM-ES, adjusts online…
Natural gradients can improve convergence in stochastic variational inference significantly but inverting the Fisher information matrix is daunting in high dimensions. Moreover, in Gaussian variational approximation, natural gradient…
The (1+1)-evolution strategy (ES) with success-based step-size adaptation is analyzed on a general convex quadratic function and its monotone transformation, that is, $f(x) = g((x - x^*)^\mathrm{T} H (x - x^*))$, where…
We combine a refined version of two-point step-size adaptation with the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES). Additionally, we suggest polished formulae for the learning rate of the covariance matrix and the…
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…
We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…
This paper presents a novel stochastic gradient descent algorithm for constrained optimization. The proposed algorithm randomly samples constraints and components of the finite sum objective function and relies on a relaxed logarithmic…
Black-box optimization is primarily important for many compute-intensive applications, including reinforcement learning (RL), robot control, etc. This paper presents a novel theoretical framework for black-box optimization, in which our…
The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is one of the most successful examples of a derandomized evolution strategy. However, it still relies on randomly sampling offspring, which can be done via a uniform distribution…
We study the problem of estimating from data, a sparse approximation to the inverse covariance matrix. Estimating a sparsity constrained inverse covariance matrix is a key component in Gaussian graphical model learning, but one that is…
Parameter adaptation, that is the capability to automatically adjust an algorithm's hyperparameters depending on the problem being faced, is one of the main trends in evolutionary computation applied to numerical optimization. While several…
The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is one of the most successful methods for solving black-box continuous optimization problems. One practically useful aspect of the CMA-ES is that it can be used without…
Pre-training a diverse set of neural network controllers in simulation has enabled robots to adapt online to damage in robot locomotion tasks. However, finding diverse, high-performing controllers requires expensive network training and…
Subgradient methods are the natural extension to the non-smooth case of the classical gradient descent for regular convex optimization problems. However, in general, they are characterized by slow convergence rates, and they require…
Discrete and mixed-variable optimization problems have appeared in several real-world applications. Most of the research on mixed-variable optimization considers a mixture of integer and continuous variables, and several integer handlings…
The zeroth-order optimization has been widely used in machine learning applications. However, the theoretical study of the zeroth-order optimization focus on the algorithms which approximate (first-order) gradients using (zeroth-order)…
Proportional integral derivative (PID) controllers are important and widely used tools in system control. Tuning of the controller gains is a laborious task, especially for complex systems such as combustion engines. To minimize the time of…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
In this paper, we propose and analyse a family of generalised stochastic composite mirror descent algorithms. With adaptive step sizes, the proposed algorithms converge without requiring prior knowledge of the problem. Combined with an…