Related papers: Drift Analysis and Evolutionary Algorithms Revisit…
Motivated by an application in kidney exchange, we study the following query-commit problem: we are given the set of vertices of a non-bipartite graph G. The set of edges in this graph are not known ahead of time. We can query any pair of…
In many optimization domains, there are multiple different solvers that contribute to the overall state-of-the-art, each performing better on some, and worse on other types of problem instances. Meta-algorithmic approaches, such as…
We consider two greedy algorithms for minimizing a convex function in a bounded convex set: an algorithm by Jones [1992] and the Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm. We first consider approximate versions of these algorithms. For smooth convex…
This paper focuses on the problem of evolving Boolean functions of odd sizes with high nonlinearity, a property of cryptographic relevance. Despite its simple formulation, this problem turns out to be remarkably difficult. We perform a…
Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population respond to a deployed classifier by manipulating their features…
For the classical maximum coverage problem, the greedy algorithm achieves a worst-case $1-1/e$ approximation, which is optimal unless $\text{P} = \text{NP}$. The notion of coverage appears in a wide range of optimization tasks, where…
Co-evolutionary algorithms have a wide range of applications, such as in hardware design, evolution of strategies for board games, and patching software bugs. However, these algorithms are poorly understood and applications are often…
In this work we introduce an implementation for which machine learning techniques helped improve the overall performance of an evolutionary algorithm for an optimization problem, namely a variation of robust minimum-cost path in graphs. In…
Most evolutionary algorithms have parameters, which allow a great flexibility in controlling their behavior and adapting them to new problems. To achieve the best performance, it is often needed to control some of the parameters during…
Suppose $\mathsf{Est}$ is a randomized estimation algorithm that uses $n$ random bits and outputs values in $\mathbb{R}^d$. We show how to execute $\mathsf{Est}$ on $k$ adaptively chosen inputs using only $n + O(k \log(d + 1))$ random bits…
Motivated by the use of high speed circuit switches in large scale data centers, we consider the problem of circuit switch scheduling. In this problem we are given demands between pairs of servers and the goal is to schedule at every time…
According to the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems all black-box algorithms perform equally well when compared over the entire set of optimization problems. An important problem related to NFL is finding a test problem for which a given…
Recent work on exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) has led to a series of increasingly complex solutions to the problem. This increase in complexity often comes at the expense of generality. Recent empirical studies suggest that,…
It is known that the evolutionary algorithm $(1+1)$-EA with mutation rate $c/n$ optimises every monotone function efficiently if $c<1$, and needs exponential time on some monotone functions (HotTopic functions) if $c\geq 2.2$. We study the…
Submodular maximization has been widely studied over the past decades, mostly because of its numerous applications in real-world problems. It is well known that the standard greedy algorithm guarantees a worst-case approximation factor of…
We investigate at decision trees that incorporate both traditional queries based on one attribute and queries based on hypotheses about the values of all attributes. Such decision trees are similar to ones studied in exact learning, where…
The performance of acquisition functions for Bayesian optimisation to locate the global optimum of continuous functions is investigated in terms of the Pareto front between exploration and exploitation. We show that Expected Improvement…
We use an elementary argument building on group actions to prove that the selection-free steady state genetic algorithm analyzed by Sutton and Witt (GECCO 2019) takes an expected number of $\Omega(2^n / \sqrt n)$ iterations to find any…
We give a greedy learning algorithm for reconstructing an evolutionary tree based on a certain harmonic average on triplets of terminal taxa. After the pairwise distances between terminal taxa are estimated from sequence data, the algorithm…
A novel and detailed convergence analysis is presented for a greedy algorithm that was previously introduced for operator reconstruction problems in the field of quantum mechanics. This algorithm is based on an offline/online decomposition…