Related papers: Drift Analysis and Evolutionary Algorithms Revisit…
The greedy algorithm for approximating dominating sets is a simple method that is known to compute an $(\ln n+1)$-approximation of a minimum dominating set on any graph with $n$ vertices. We show that a small modification of the greedy…
We propose a new method based on discrete Fourier analysis to analyze the time evolutionary algorithms spend on plateaus. This immediately gives a concise proof of the classic estimate of the expected runtime of the $(1+1)$ evolutionary…
This paper characterizes and discusses devolutionary genetic algorithms and evaluates their performances in solving the minimum labeling Steiner tree (MLST) problem. We define devolutionary algorithms as the process of reaching a feasible…
We consider the maximum bipartite matching problem in stochastic settings, namely the query-commit and price-of-information models. In the query-commit model, an edge e independently exists with probability $p_e$. We can query whether an…
Classical optimization algorithms--hill climbing, simulated annealing, population-based methods--generate candidate solutions via random perturbations. We replace the random proposal generator with an LLM agent that reasons about evaluation…
Runtime analysis aims at contributing to our understanding of evolutionary algorithms through mathematical analyses of their runtimes. In the context of discrete optimization problems, runtime analysis classically studies the time needed to…
We propose distributed algorithms for two well-established problems that operate efficiently under extremely harsh conditions. Our algorithms achieve state-of-the-art performance in a simple and novel way. Our algorithm for maximal…
Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are universal solvers inspired by principles of natural evolution. In many applications, EAs produce astonishingly good solutions. As they are able to deal with complex optimisation problems, they show great…
The "fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm", a.k.a. FISTA, is one of the most well-known first-order optimisation scheme in the literature, as it achieves the worst-case $O(1/k^2)$ optimal convergence rate in terms of objective…
We study the problem of learning a most biased coin among a set of coins by tossing the coins adaptively. The goal is to minimize the number of tosses until we identify a coin i* whose posterior probability of being most biased is at least…
This work uses genetic programming to explore the space of continuous optimisers, with the goal of discovering novel ways of doing optimisation. In order to keep the search space broad, the optimisers are evolved from scratch using Push, a…
We give the first algorithm that maintains an approximate decision tree over an arbitrary sequence of insertions and deletions of labeled examples, with strong guarantees on the worst-case running time per update request. For instance, we…
We study online bipartite edge coloring, with nodes on one side of the graph revealed sequentially. The trivial greedy algorithm is $(2-o(1))$-competitive, which is optimal for graphs of low maximum degree, $\Delta=O(\log n)$ [BNMN IPL'92].…
We study the problem of scheduling sensors in a resource-constrained linear dynamical system, where the objective is to select a small subset of sensors from a large network to perform the state estimation task. We formulate this problem as…
Adaptive Fourier decomposition (AFD, precisely 1-D AFD or Core-AFD) was originated for the goal of positive frequency representations of signals. It achieved the goal and at the same time offered fast decompositions of signals. There then…
Pareto optimization using evolutionary multi-objective algorithms has been widely applied to solve constrained submodular optimization problems. A crucial factor determining the runtime of the used evolutionary algorithms to obtain good…
We propose a novel algorithm for greedy forward feature selection for regularized least-squares (RLS) regression and classification, also known as the least-squares support vector machine or ridge regression. The algorithm, which we call…
Randomized greedy algorithms form one of the simplest yet most effective approaches for computing approximate matchings in graphs. In this paper, we focus on the class of vertex-iterative (VI) randomized greedy matching algorithms, which…
We introduce the model selection problem in pure exploration linear bandits, where the learner needs to adapt to the instance-dependent complexity measure of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true model. We design algorithms in…