Related papers: COCO: The Experimental Procedure
In this work, we investigate black-box optimization from the perspective of frequentist kernel methods. We propose a novel batch optimization algorithm, which jointly maximizes the acquisition function and select points from a whole batch…
Simulation Optimization (SO) refers to the optimization of an objective function subject to constraints, both of which can be evaluated through a stochastic simulation. To address specific features of a particular simulation---discrete or…
We introduce a novel distributed derivative-free optimization framework that is resilient to stragglers. The proposed method employs coded search directions at which the objective function is evaluated, and a decoding step to find the next…
Existing Bayesian Optimization (BO) methods typically balance exploration and exploitation to optimize costly objective functions. However, these methods often suffer from a significant one-step bias, which may lead to convergence towards…
Obtaining standardized crowdsourced benchmark of computational methods is a major issue in data science communities. Dedicated frameworks enabling fair benchmarking in a unified environment are yet to be developed. Here we introduce…
Robust optimization (RO) is a common approach to tractably obtain safeguarding solutions for optimization problems with uncertain constraints. In this paper, we study a statistical framework to integrate data into RO, based on learning a…
Recent advances in quantum computing and the increasing availability of quantum hardware have substantially enhanced the practical relevance of quantum approaches to discrete optimization. Among these, the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary…
Bayesian optimization (BO) based on Gaussian process models is a powerful paradigm to optimize black-box functions that are expensive to evaluate. While several BO algorithms provably converge to the global optimum of the unknown function,…
The core challenge of high-dimensional and expensive black-box optimization (BBO) is how to obtain better performance faster with little function evaluation cost. The essence of the problem is how to design an efficient optimization…
Matrix completion is a ubiquitous tool in machine learning and data analysis. Most work in this area has focused on the number of observations necessary to obtain an accurate low-rank approximation. In practice, however, the cost of…
We provide a systematic approach for testing self-organization (SO) algorithms. The main challenges for such a testing domain are the strongly ramified state space, the possible error masking, the interleaving of mechanisms, and the oracle…
In an era where data-driven decision-making and computational efficiency are paramount, optimization plays a foundational role in advancing fields such as mathematics, computer science, operations research, machine learning, and beyond.…
Utilitarian algorithm configuration identifies a parameter setting for a given algorithm that maximizes a user's utility. Utility functions offer a theoretically well-grounded approach to optimizing decision-making under uncertainty and are…
Experimentation in online digital platforms is used to inform decision making. Specifically, the goal of many experiments is to optimize a metric of interest. Null hypothesis statistical testing can be ill-suited to this task, as it is…
We introduce RobotPerf, a vendor-agnostic benchmarking suite designed to evaluate robotics computing performance across a diverse range of hardware platforms using ROS 2 as its common baseline. The suite encompasses ROS 2 packages covering…
Extrapolating physical error rates to logical error rates requires many assumptions and thus can radically under- or overestimate the performance of an error correction implementation. We introduce logical randomized benchmarking, a…
We present a benchmark to facilitate simulated manipulation; an attempt to overcome the obstacles of physical benchmarks through the distribution of a real world, ground truth dataset. Users are given various simulated manipulation tasks…
We study test-time scaling, where a model improves its answer through multi-round self-reflection at inference. We introduce In-Context Policy Optimization (ICPO), in which an agent optimizes its response in context using self-assessed or…
Benchmark Design in Black-Box Optimization (BBO) is a fundamental yet open-ended topic. Early BBO benchmarks are predominantly human-crafted, introducing expert bias and constraining diversity. Automating this design process can relieve the…
Simulators are a critical component of modern robotics research. Strategies for both perception and decision making can be studied in simulation first before deployed to real world systems, saving on time and costs. Despite significant…