Related papers: Improving the Flexibility and Robustness of Model-…
In this work, we propose a heuristic based open source solver for finding global solution to constrained derivative-free optimization (DFO) problems. Our solver named Global optimization using Surrogates for Derivative-free Optimization…
We study the problem of optimizing a function under a \emph{budgeted number of evaluations}. We only assume that the function is \emph{locally} smooth around one of its global optima. The difficulty of optimization is measured in terms of…
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) is a method that does not require the calculation of gradients or higher-order derivatives of the objective function, making it suitable for cases where the objective function is non-differentiable or the…
Noisy labels in distributed datasets induce severe local overfitting and consequently compromise the global model in federated learning (FL). Most existing solutions rely on selecting clean devices or aligning with public clean datasets,…
The late Professor M. J. D. Powell devised five trust-region methods for derivative-free optimization, namely COBYLA, UOBYQA, NEWUOA, BOBYQA, and LINCOA. He carefully implemented them into publicly available solvers, renowned for their…
Bayesian Optimisation (BO) refers to a suite of techniques for global optimisation of expensive black box functions, which use introspective Bayesian models of the function to efficiently search for the optimum. While BO has been applied…
Increased reliance on graphics processing units (GPUs) for high-intensity computing tasks raises challenges regarding energy consumption. To address this issue, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has emerged as a promising…
Preference alignment is pivotal for empowering large language models (LLMs) to generate helpful and harmless responses. However, the performance of preference alignment is highly sensitive to the prevalent noise in the preference data.…
Derivative-Free Optimization (DFO) involves methods that rely solely on evaluations of the objective function. One of the earliest strategies for designing DFO methods is to adapt first-order methods by replacing gradients with…
We study derivative-free methods for policy optimization over the class of linear policies. We focus on characterizing the convergence rate of these methods when applied to linear-quadratic systems, and study various settings of driving…
In this paper, we analyze the accuracy of gradient estimates obtained by linear interpolation when the underlying function is subject to bounded measurement noise. The total gradient error is decomposed into a deterministic component…
This paper proposes the method 2D-MoSub (2-dimensional model-based subspace method), which is a novel derivative-free optimization (DFO) method based on the subspace method for general unconstrained optimization and especially aims to solve…
This paper proposes modifications to the data-enabled policy optimization (DeePO) algorithm to mitigate state perturbations. DeePO is an adaptive, data-driven approach designed to iteratively compute a feedback gain equivalent to the…
Critic-free methods like GRPO reduce memory demands by estimating advantages from multiple rollouts but tend to converge slowly, as critical learning signals are diluted by an abundance of uninformative samples and tokens. To tackle this…
This paper presents a finite difference quasi-Newton method for the minimization of noisy functions. The method takes advantage of the scalability and power of BFGS updating, and employs an adaptive procedure for choosing the differencing…
This study addresses the challenge of noise in training datasets for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. We categorize noise into pointwise noise, which includes…
The Low Order-Value Optimization (LOVO) problem involves minimizing the minimum among a finite number of function values within a feasible set. LOVO has several practical applications such as robust parameter estimation, protein alignment,…
Because the choice and tuning of the optimizer affects the speed, and ultimately the performance of deep learning, there is significant past and recent research in this area. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there is no generally agreed-upon…
Sparse Optimal Scoring (SOS) reformulates linear discriminant analysis to enable feature selection through elastic net regularization, making it well-suited for high-dimensional settings where the number of features exceeds observations.…
Consensus-based optimization (CBO) is an agent-based derivative-free method for non-smooth global optimization that has been introduced in 2017, leveraging a surprising interplay between stochastic exploration and Laplace principle. In…