Related papers: Black-box $\alpha$-divergence Minimization
A wide spectrum of design and decision problems, including parameter tuning, A/B testing and drug design, intrinsically are instances of black-box optimization. Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful tool that models and optimizes such…
In this paper, we focus on the tempered subdiffusive Black-Scholes model. The main part of our work consists of the finite difference method as a numerical approach to the option pricing in the considered model. We derive the governing…
Chip placement is a vital stage in modern chip design as it has a substantial impact on the subsequent processes and the overall quality of the final chip. The use of black-box optimization (BBO) for chip placement has a history of several…
We introduce kernel-QA, a black-box optimization (BBO) method that constructs surrogate models analytically using low-order polynomial kernels within a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) framework, enabling efficient…
Conditional sampling is a fundamental task in Bayesian statistics and generative modeling. Consider the problem of sampling from the posterior distribution $P_{X|Y=y^*}$ for some observation $y^*$, where the likelihood $P_{Y|X}$ is known,…
We prove that black-box variational inference (BBVI) with control variates, particularly the sticking-the-landing (STL) estimator, converges at a geometric (traditionally called "linear") rate under perfect variational family specification.…
Bayesian optimization is widely used for optimizing expensive black box functions, but most existing approaches focus on scalar responses. In many scientific and engineering settings the response is functional, varying smoothly over an…
We provide a computationally efficient black-box reduction from mechanism design to algorithm design in very general settings. Specifically, we give an approximation-preserving reduction from truthfully maximizing \emph{any} objective under…
Unlike the white-box counterparts that are widely studied and readily accessible, adversarial examples in black-box settings are generally more Herculean on account of the difficulty of estimating gradients. Many methods achieve the task by…
The paper proposes a new algorithm called SymBa that aims to achieve more biologically plausible learning than Back-Propagation (BP). The algorithm is based on the Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm, which is a BP-free method for training…
Very recently, Hartline and Lucier studied single-parameter mechanism design problems in the Bayesian setting. They proposed a black-box reduction that converted Bayesian approximation algorithms into Bayesian-Incentive-Compatible (BIC)…
We consider stochastic gradient estimation using only black-box function evaluations, where the function argument lies within a probability simplex. This problem is motivated from gradient-descent optimization procedures in multiple…
Backpropagation (BP) is widely used for calculating gradients in deep neural networks (DNNs). Applied often along with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) or its variants, BP is considered as a de-facto choice in a variety of machine learning…
We address the problem of optimising the average payoff for a large number of cooperating agents, where the payoff function is unknown and treated as a black box. While standard Bayesian Optimisation (BO) methods struggle with the…
Despite the high quality performance of the deep neural network in real-world applications, they are susceptible to minor perturbations of adversarial attacks. This is mostly undetectable to human vision. The impact of such attacks has…
In recent years, solving optimization problems involving black-box simulators has become a point of focus for the machine learning community due to their ubiquity in science and engineering. The simulators describe a forward process…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a widely used approach for blackbox optimization that leverages a Gaussian process (GP) model and an acquisition function to guide future sampling. While effective in low-dimensional settings, BO faces…
Gradient-based optimization is the workhorse of deep learning, offering efficient and scalable training via backpropagation. However, exposing gradients during training can leak sensitive information about the underlying data, raising…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) provide a formalism to quantify and calibrate uncertainty in deep learning. Current inference approaches for BNNs often resort to few-sample estimation for scalability, which can harm predictive performance,…
Time-Varying Bayesian Optimization (TVBO) is the go-to framework for optimizing a time-varying, expensive, noisy black-box function $f$. However, most of the asymptotic guarantees offered by TVBO algorithms rely on the assumption that…