Related papers: Automated Algorithm Selection on Continuous Black-…

In this survey, we introduce Meta-Black-Box-Optimization~(MetaBBO) as an emerging avenue within the Evolutionary Computation~(EC) community, which incorporates Meta-learning approaches to assist automated algorithm design. Despite the…

Fair algorithm evaluation is conditioned on the existence of high-quality benchmark datasets that are non-redundant and are representative of typical optimization scenarios. In this paper, we evaluate three heuristics for selecting diverse…

Quality-Diversity has emerged as a powerful family of evolutionary algorithms that generate diverse populations of high-performing solutions by implementing local competition principles inspired by biological evolution. While these…

Despite the increasing interest in constrained multiobjective optimization in recent years, constrained multiobjective optimization problems (CMOPs) are still unsatisfactory understood and characterized. For this reason, the selection of…

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…

Dynamic Optimization Problems (DOPs) are challenging to address due to their complex nature, i.e., dynamic environment variation. Evolutionary Computation methods are generally advantaged in solving DOPs since they resemble dynamic…

Black-box optimization is primarily important for many compute-intensive applications, including reinforcement learning (RL), robot control, etc. This paper presents a novel theoretical framework for black-box optimization, in which our…

One of the most common problem-solving heuristics is by analogy. For a given problem, a solver can be viewed as a strategic walk on its fitness landscape. Thus if a solver works for one problem instance, we expect it will also be effective…

Existing studies in black-box optimization for machine learning suffer from low generalizability, caused by a typically selective choice of problem instances used for training and testing different optimization algorithms. Among other…

We consider the challenge of black-box optimization within hybrid discrete-continuous and variable-length spaces, a problem that arises in various applications, such as decision tree learning and symbolic regression. We propose DisCo-DSO…

Optimizing functions without access to gradients is the remit of black-box methods such as evolution strategies. While highly general, their learning dynamics are often times heuristic and inflexible - exactly the limitations that…

Genetic algorithms constitute a family of black-box optimization algorithms, which take inspiration from the principles of biological evolution. While they provide a general-purpose tool for optimization, their particular instantiations can…

One of the most challenging problems in evolutionary computation is to select from its family of diverse solvers one that performs well on a given problem. This algorithm selection problem is complicated by the fact that different phases of…

Combinatorial optimization (CO) problems arise across a broad spectrum of domains, including medicine, logistics, and manufacturing. While exact solutions are often computationally infeasible, many practical applications require…

Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…

The performance of automated algorithm selection (AAS) strongly depends on the portfolio of algorithms to choose from. Selecting the portfolio is a non-trivial task that requires balancing the trade-off between the higher flexibility of…

In many recent works, the potential of Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) features to numerically characterize, in particular, single-objective continuous optimization problems has been demonstrated. These numerical features provide the…

Recent approaches to training algorithm selectors in the black-box optimisation domain have advocated for the use of training data that is algorithm-centric in order to encapsulate information about how an algorithm performs on an instance,…

Model merging has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to training large language models (LLMs) from scratch, enabling researchers to combine pre-trained models into more capable systems without full retraining. Evolutionary approaches…

Black box optimization requires specifying a search space to explore for solutions, e.g. a d-dimensional compact space, and this choice is critical for getting the best results at a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, determining a high…