Related papers: KL-based Control of the Learning Schedule for Surr…
This study aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of single-objective and multi-objective optimisation algorithms for the design of an elbow-type draft tube, as well as to introduce a computationally efficient optimisation workflow. The…
In most machine learning applications, classification accuracy is not the primary metric of interest. Binary classifiers which face class imbalance are often evaluated by the $F_\beta$ score, area under the precision-recall curve, Precision…
Stochastic majorization-minimization (SMM) is a class of stochastic optimization algorithms that proceed by sampling new data points and minimizing a recursive average of surrogate functions of an objective function. The surrogates are…
Gradient-free optimization methods, such as surrogate based optimization (SBO) methods, and genetic (GAs), or evolutionary (EAs) algorithms have gained popularity in the field of constrained optimization of expensive black-box functions.…
One of the most promising applications of near-term quantum computing is the simulation of quantum systems, a classically intractable task. Quantum simulation requires computationally expensive matrix exponentiation; Trotter-Suzuki…
This paper addresses a new interpretation of the traditional optimization method in reinforcement learning (RL) as optimization problems using reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, and derives a new optimization method using forward KL…
In this paper, we approach the problem of optimizing blackbox functions over large hybrid search spaces consisting of both combinatorial and continuous parameters. We demonstrate that previous evolutionary algorithms which rely on…
Service system performance depends on how participants respond to design choices, but modeling these responses is hard due to the complexity of human behavior. We introduce an LLM-powered multi-agent simulation (LLM-MAS) framework for…
Kullback-Leibler (KL) control enables efficient numerical methods for nonlinear optimal control problems. The crucial assumption of KL control is the full controllability of the transition distribution. However, this assumption is often…
Optimizing functions without access to gradients is the remit of black-box methods such as evolution strategies. While highly general, their learning dynamics are often times heuristic and inflexible - exactly the limitations that…
Central to the design of many robot systems and their controllers is solving a constrained blackbox optimization problem. This paper presents CNMA, a new method of solving this problem that is conservative in the number of potentially…
The central task in modeling complex dynamical systems is parameter estimation. This task involves numerous evaluations of a computationally expensive objective function. Surrogate-based optimization introduces a computationally efficient…
Bayesian Optimization (BO), guided by Gaussian process (GP) surrogates, has proven to be an invaluable technique for efficient, high-dimensional, black-box optimization, a critical problem inherent to many applications such as industrial…
Surrogate-based optimization relies on so-called infill criteria (acquisition functions) to decide which point to evaluate next. When Kriging is used as the surrogate model of choice (also called Bayesian optimization), one of the most…
Correctness-based Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) trains language models from binary feedback on sampled outputs, but the objective optimized in expectation and the stochastic update geometry induced by finite rollout…
In this study, we analyze behaviours of the well-known CMA-ES by extracting the time-series features on its dynamic strategy parameters. An extensive experiment was conducted on twelve CMA-ES variants and 24 test problems taken from the…
Intuitively, a more deterministic time series should be easier to forecast. However, point-wise loss functions (e.g., MSE and MAE), serving as differentiable surrogates for the ideal optimization target, score each timestamp independently…
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…
Multi-label loss functions are usually non-differentiable, requiring surrogate loss functions for gradient-based optimisation. The consistency of surrogate loss functions is not proven and is exacerbated by the conflicting nature of…
Black-box optimization refers to the optimization problem whose objective function and/or constraint sets are either unknown, inaccessible, or non-existent. In many applications, especially with the involvement of humans, the only way to…