Related papers: LM-CMA: an Alternative to L-BFGS for Large Scale B…

Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is a highly effective optimization technique. A primary challenge when applying CMA-ES in high dimensionality is sampling from a multivariate normal distribution with an arbitrary…

When solving optimization problems with black-box approaches, the algorithms gather valuable information about the problem instance during the optimization process. This information is used to adjust the distributions from which new…

The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is widely accepted as a robust derivative-free continuous optimization algorithm for non-linear and non-convex optimization problems. CMA-ES is well known to be almost…

Motivated by applications arising from large scale optimization and machine learning, we consider stochastic quasi-Newton (SQN) methods for solving unconstrained convex optimization problems. The convergence analysis of the SQN methods,…

Global convergence of an online (stochastic) limited memory version of the Broyden-Fletcher- Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) quasi-Newton method for solving optimization problems with stochastic objectives that arise in large scale machine learning…

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is an effective method for finding the global optimum of expensive black-box functions. However, it is well known that applying BO to high-dimensional optimization problems is challenging. To address this issue, a…

This work introduces StoMADS, a stochastic variant of the mesh adaptive direct-search (MADS) algorithm originally developed for deterministic blackbox optimization. StoMADS considers the unconstrained optimization of an objective function f…

Latent Gaussian models (LGMs) are perhaps the most commonly used class of models in statistical applications. Nevertheless, in areas ranging from longitudinal studies in biostatistics to geostatistics, it is easy to find datasets that…

This study targets the mixed-integer black-box optimization (MI-BBO) problem where continuous and integer variables should be optimized simultaneously. The CMA-ES, our focus in this study, is a population-based stochastic search method that…

The standard L-BFGS method relies on gradient approximations that are not dominated by noise, so that search directions are descent directions, the line search is reliable, and quasi-Newton updating yields useful quadratic models of the…

We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function that may be nonsmooth and nonconvex, subject to bound constraints. We propose an algorithm that uses the L-BFGS quasi-Newton approximation of the problem's curvature together with…

Despite the state-of-the-art performance of the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES), high-dimensional black-box optimization problems are challenging tasks. Such problems often involve a property called low effective…

Iterative code generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) can be viewed as an optimization process guided by textual feedback. However, existing LLM self-correction methods predominantly operate in a stateless, trial-and-error manner akin…

The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is a powerful optimization method for continuous black-box optimization problems. Several noise-handling methods have been proposed to bring out the optimization performance of…

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…

An open challenge in recent machine learning is about how to improve the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) in a black-box setting, i.e., without access to detailed information such as output token probabilities. Existing…

We propose a novel constraint-handling technique for the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES). The proposed technique is aimed at solving explicitly constrained black-box continuous optimization problems, in which the…

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…

This paper describes an implementation of the L-BFGS method designed to deal with two adversarial situations. The first occurs in distributed computing environments where some of the computational nodes devoted to the evaluation of the…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful class of algorithms for optimizing expensive black-box functions, but designing effective BO algorithms remains a manual, expertise-driven task. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs)…