Related papers: Escaping local minima with derivative-free methods…
Machine learning pipelines often rely on optimization procedures to make discrete decisions (e.g., sorting, picking closest neighbors, or shortest paths). Although these discrete decisions are easily computed, they break the…
In statistics, it is common to encounter multi-modal and non-smooth likelihood (or objective function) maximization problems, where the parameters have known upper and lower bounds. This paper proposes a novel derivative-free global…
Physical systems are modelled and investigated within simulation software in an increasing range of applications. In reality an investigation of the system is often performed by empirical test scenarios which are related to typical…
This paper considers Bayesian optimization (BO) for problems with known outer problem structure. In contrast to the classic BO setting, where the objective function itself is unknown and needs to be iteratively estimated from noisy…
The problem of interest is the minimization of a nonlinear function subject to nonlinear equality constraints using a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. The minimization must be performed while observing only noisy evaluations…
A piecewise constant Mayer cost function is used to model optimal control problems in which the state space is partitioned into several regions, each having its own Mayer cost value. In such a context, the standard numerical methods used in…
Two genres of heuristics that are frequently reported to perform much better on "real-world" instances than in the worst case are greedy algorithms and local search algorithms. In this paper, we systematically study these two types of…
We provide several quantum algorithms for continuous optimization that do not require gradient estimation. Instead, we encode the optimization problem into the dynamics of a physical system and coherently simulate the time evolution. We…
In this paper, we study the minimax optimization problem in the smooth and strongly convex-strongly concave setting when we have access to noisy estimates of gradients. In particular, we first analyze the stochastic Gradient Descent Ascent…
Noise-induced transitions between multistable states happen in a multitude of systems, such as species extinction in biology, protein folding, or tipping points in climate science. Large deviation theory is the rigorous language to describe…
This paper introduces adaptive Bregman proximal gradient algorithms for solving convex composite minimization problems without relying on global relative smoothness or strong convexity assumptions. Building upon recent advances in adaptive…
We consider the problem of global optimization with noisy zeroth order oracles - a well-motivated problem useful for various applications ranging from hyper-parameter tuning for deep learning to new material design. Existing work relies on…
We propose a new distributed optimization algorithm for solving a class of constrained optimization problems in which (a) the objective function is separable (i.e., the sum of local objective functions of agents), (b) the optimization…
Global optimization finds applications in a wide range of real world problems. The multi-start methods are a popular class of global optimization techniques, which are based on the ideas of conducting local searches at multiple starting…
Hybrid variational quantum algorithms, which combine a classical optimizer with evaluations on a quantum chip, are the most promising candidates to show quantum advantage on current noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. The…
Distributed optimization utilizes local computation and communication to realize a global aim of optimizing the sum of local objective functions. This article addresses a class of constrained distributed nonconvex optimization problems…
Placement is crucial in the physical design, as it greatly affects power, performance, and area metrics. Recent advancements in analytical methods, such as DREAMPlace, have demonstrated impressive performance in global placement. However,…
We analyze the convergence properties of a modified barrier method for solving bound-constrained optimization problems where evaluations of the objective function and its derivatives are affected by bounded and non-diminishing noise. The…
Research in derivative-free global optimization is under active development, and many solution techniques are available today. Therefore, the experimental comparison of previous and emerging algorithms must be kept up to date. This paper…
We propose a unified framework for global-local regularization that bridges the gap between classical techniques -- such as ridge regression and the nonnegative garotte -- and modern Bayesian hierarchical modeling. By estimating local…