Related papers: When Does Hillclimbing Fail on Monotone Functions:…
Real-world data typically contain repeated and periodic patterns. This suggests that they can be effectively represented and compressed using only a few coefficients of an appropriate basis (e.g., Fourier, Wavelets, etc.). However, distance…
While the theoretical analysis of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) has made significant progress for pseudo-Boolean optimization problems in the last 25 years, only sporadic theoretical results exist on how EAs solve permutation-based…
Automatic algorithms attempt to provide approximate solutions that differ from exact solutions by no more than a user-specified error tolerance. This paper describes an automatic, adaptive algorithm for approximating the solution to a…
This paper improves the state-of-the-art rate of a first-order algorithm for solving entropy regularized optimal transport. The resulting rate for approximating the optimal transport (OT) has been improved from…
Monotone Boolean functions are a structurally important class of Boolean functions, but their restricted form imposes strong limitations on achievable nonlinearity. In this paper, we investigate whether evolutionary computation can evolve…
Sinkhorn algorithm is the de-facto standard approximation algorithm for optimal transport, which has been applied to a variety of applications, including image processing and natural language processing. In theory, the proof of its…
Random constraint satisfaction problems can display a very rich structure in the space of solutions, with often an ergodicity breaking -- also known as clustering or dynamical -- transition preceding the satisfiability threshold when the…
We compare Evolutionary Algorithms with Minima Hopping for global optimization in the field of cluster structure prediction. We introduce a new {\em average offspring} recombination operator and compare it with previously used operators.…
We present an iterative inverse reinforcement learning algorithm to infer optimal cost functions in continuous spaces. Based on a popular maximum entropy criteria, our approach iteratively finds a weight improvement step and proposes a…
One important goal of black-box complexity theory is the development of complexity models allowing to derive meaningful lower bounds for whole classes of randomized search heuristics. Complementing classical runtime analysis, black-box…
We present a new method for analyzing the running time of parallel evolutionary algorithms with spatially structured populations. Based on the fitness-level method, it yields upper bounds on the expected parallel running time. This allows…
Dynamic linear functions on the hypercube are functions which assign to each bit a positive weight, but the weights change over time. Throughout optimization, these functions maintain the same global optimum, and never have defecting local…
With the goal to provide absolute lower bounds for the best possible running times that can be achieved by $(1+\lambda)$-type search heuristics on common benchmark problems, we recently suggested a dynamic programming approach that computes…
We study how Reinforcement Learning can be employed to optimally control parameters in evolutionary algorithms. We control the mutation probability of a (1+1) evolutionary algorithm on the OneMax function. This problem is modeled as a…
Rotation symmetric Boolean functions represent an interesting class of Boolean functions as they are relatively rare compared to general Boolean functions. At the same time, the functions in this class can have excellent properties, making…
We study unbiased $(1+1)$ evolutionary algorithms on linear functions with an unknown number $n$ of bits with non-zero weight. Static algorithms achieve an optimal runtime of $O(n (\ln n)^{2+\epsilon})$, however, it remained unclear whether…
In computer vision, it is often observed that formulating regression problems as a classification task often yields better performance. We investigate this curious phenomenon and provide a derivation to show that classification, with the…
We show that every algorithm for testing $n$-variate Boolean functions for monotonicity must have query complexity $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{1/4})$. All previous lower bounds for this problem were designed for non-adaptive algorithms and, as a…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. A leapfrog integrator is commonly used to implement HMC in practice, but its performance can be…
Drift analysis has become a powerful tool to prove bounds on the runtime of randomized search heuristics. It allows, for example, fairly simple proofs for the classical problem how the (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) optimizes an…