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Hyperparameters of deep neural networks are often optimized by grid search, random search or Bayesian optimization. As an alternative, we propose to use the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), which is known for its…
The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is a powerful optimization method for continuous black-box optimization problems. Several noise-handling methods have been proposed to bring out the optimization performance of…
In many practical optimization problems, the derivatives of the functions to be optimized are unavailable or unreliable. Such optimization problems are solved using derivative-free optimization techniques. One of the state-of-the-art…
Evolution-based neural architecture search requires high computational resources, resulting in long search time. In this work, we propose a framework of applying the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) to the neural…
This study modifies the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) algorithm for multi-modal optimization problems. The enhancements focus on addressing the challenges of multiple global minima, improving the algorithm's…
Pre-training a diverse set of neural network controllers in simulation has enabled robots to adapt online to damage in robot locomotion tasks. However, finding diverse, high-performing controllers requires expensive network training and…
This work provides an efficient sampling method for the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) in large-scale settings. In contract to the Gaussian sampling in CMA-ES, the proposed method generates mutation vectors from a…
The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is one of the most successful examples of a derandomized evolution strategy. However, it still relies on randomly sampling offspring, which can be done via a uniform distribution…
Recently it was shown by Nesterov (2011) that techniques form convex optimization can be used to successfully accelerate simple derivative-free randomized optimization methods. The appeal of those schemes lies in their low complexity, which…
Contextual policy search (CPS) is a class of multi-task reinforcement learning algorithms that is particularly useful for robotic applications. A recent state-of-the-art method is Contextual Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategies…
Despite the state-of-the-art performance of the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES), high-dimensional black-box optimization problems are challenging tasks. Such problems often involve a property called low effective…
We propose a novel constraint-handling technique for the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES). The proposed technique is aimed at solving explicitly constrained black-box continuous optimization problems, in which the…
We present a novel black box optimization algorithm called Hessian Estimation Evolution Strategy. The algorithm updates the covariance matrix of its sampling distribution by directly estimating the curvature of the objective function. This…
The interest in accelerating black-box optimizers has resulted in several surrogate model-assisted version of the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy, a state-of-the-art continuous black-box optimizer. The version called…
This paper introduces a novel theoretically sound approach for the celebrated CMA-ES algorithm. Assuming the parameters of the multi variate normal distribution for the minimum follow a conjugate prior distribution, we derive their optimal…
Modern machine learning uses more and more advanced optimization techniques to find optimal hyper parameters. Whenever the objective function is non-convex, non continuous and with potentially multiple local minima, standard gradient…
Evolutionary optimization algorithms often face defects and limitations that complicate the evolution processes or even prevent them from reaching the global optimum. A notable constraint pertains to the considerable quantity of function…
Restart strategy helps the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) to increase the probability of finding the global optimum in optimization, while a single run CMA-ES is easy to be trapped in local optima. In this paper,…
In the post-Moore era, main performance gains of black-box optimizers are increasingly depending on parallelism, especially for large-scale optimization (LSO). Here we propose to parallelize the well-established covariance matrix adaptation…
Single-objective optimization algorithms search for the single highest-quality solution with respect to an objective. Quality diversity (QD) optimization algorithms, such as Covariance Matrix Adaptation MAP-Elites (CMA-ME), search for a…