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Theoretical and empirical research on evolutionary computation methods complement each other by providing two fundamentally different approaches towards a better understanding of black-box optimization heuristics. In discrete optimization,…
High-dimensional black-box optimisation remains an important yet notoriously challenging problem. Despite the success of Bayesian optimisation methods on continuous domains, domains that are categorical, or that mix continuous and…
The types of constraints encountered in black-box and simulation-based optimization problems differ significantly from those treated in nonlinear programming. We introduce a characterization of constraints to address this situation. We…
The optimization of expensive black-box simulators arises in a myriad of modern scientific and engineering applications. Bayesian optimization provides an appealing solution, by leveraging a fitted surrogate model to guide the selection of…
Predictive algorithms are now used to help distribute a large share of our society's resources and sanctions, such as healthcare, loans, criminal detentions, and tax audits. Under the right circumstances, these algorithms can improve the…
The encoding of solutions in black-box optimization is a delicate, handcrafted balance between expressiveness and domain knowledge -- between exploring a wide variety of solutions, and ensuring that those solutions are useful. Our main…
Matrix factorization methods - including Factor analysis (FA), and Principal Components Analysis (PCA) - are widely used for inferring and summarizing structure in multivariate data. Many matrix factorization methods exist, corresponding to…
Bayesian optimization is a powerful global optimization technique for expensive black-box functions. One of its shortcomings is that it requires auxiliary optimization of an acquisition function at each iteration. This auxiliary…
Finding a large set of optima in a multimodal optimization landscape is a challenging task. Classical population-based evolutionary algorithms typically converge only to a single solution. While this can be counteracted by applying niching…
Real-world optimization problems are generally not just black-box problems, but also involve mixed types of inputs in which discrete and continuous variables coexist. Such mixed-space optimization possesses the primary challenge of modeling…
The F-measure, which has originally been introduced in information retrieval, is nowadays routinely used as a performance metric for problems such as binary classification, multi-label classification, and structured output prediction.…
We consider the distributed optimization problem for a multi-agent system. Here, multiple agents cooperatively optimize an objective by sharing information through a communication network and performing computations. In this tutorial, we…
Within one decade, Deep Learning overtook the dominating solution methods of countless problems of artificial intelligence. ``Deep'' refers to the deep architectures with operations in manifolds of which there are no immediate observations.…
The clever hybridization of quantum computing concepts and evolutionary algorithms (EAs) resulted in a new field called quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithms (QIEAs). Unlike traditional EAs, QIEAs employ quantum bits to adopt a…
Black-box optimization formulations for biological sequence design have drawn recent attention due to their promising potential impact on the pharmaceutical industry. In this work, we propose to unify two seemingly distinct worlds:…
AI-driven design problems, such as DNA/protein sequence design, are commonly tackled from two angles: generative modeling, which efficiently captures the feasible design space (e.g., natural images or biological sequences), and model-based…
We present a data-driven Bayesian nonparametric approach for global optimization (DaBNO) of stochastic black-box function. The function value depends on the distribution of a random vector. However, this distribution is usually complex and…
Exploratory landscape analysis (ELA) is a well-established tool to characterize optimization problems via numerical features. ELA is used for problem comprehension, algorithm design, and applications such as automated algorithm selection…
Understanding generalization in deep learning has been one of the major challenges in statistical learning theory over the last decade. While recent work has illustrated that the dataset and the training algorithm must be taken into account…
This thesis investigates the use of problem-specific knowledge to enhance a genetic algorithm approach to multiple-choice optimisation problems.It shows that such information can significantly enhance performance, but that the choice of…