Related papers: StoMADS: Stochastic blackbox optimization using pr…
In simulation-based engineering, design choices are often obtained following the optimization of complex blackbox models. These models frequently involve mixed-variable domains with quantitative and categorical variables. Unlike…
In this paper a novel stochastic optimization and extremum seeking algorithm is presented, one which is based on time-delayed random perturbations and step size adaptation. For the case of a one-dimensional quadratic unconstrained…
The limited memory BFGS method (L-BFGS) of Liu and Nocedal (1989) is often considered to be the method of choice for continuous optimization when first- and/or second- order information is available. However, the use of L-BFGS can be…
In many contemporary optimization problems such as those arising in machine learning, it can be computationally challenging or even infeasible to evaluate an entire function or its derivatives. This motivates the use of stochastic…
A class of optimization problems characterized by a weighted finite-sum objective function subject to box constraints is considered. We propose a novel stochastic optimization method, named AS-BOX (\text{A}ddi\-ti\-onal \text{S}ampling for…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested experimentally for solving stochastic optimization problems in which the decision variables are constrained to satisfy equations defined by deterministic, smooth, and nonlinear functions. It is…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
For safety-critical black-box optimization tasks, observations of the constraints and the objective are often noisy and available only for the feasible points. We propose an approach based on log barriers to find a local solution of a…
This paper studies some asymptotic properties of adaptive algorithms widely used in optimization and machine learning, and among them Adagrad and Rmsprop, which are involved in most of the blackbox deep learning algorithms. Our setup is the…
We present two easy-to-implement gradient-free/zeroth-order methods to optimize a stochastic non-smooth function accessible only via a black-box. The methods are built upon efficient first-order methods in the heavy-tailed case, i.e., when…
This study targets the mixed-integer black-box optimization (MI-BBO) problem where continuous and integer variables should be optimized simultaneously. The CMA-ES, our focus in this study, is a population-based stochastic search method that…
Estimating probabilistic deformable template models is a new approach in the fields of computer vision and probabilistic atlases in computational anatomy. A first coherent statistical framework modelling the variability as a hidden random…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
We consider smooth stochastic convex optimization problems in the context of algorithms which are based on directional derivatives of the objective function. This context can be considered as an intermediate one between derivative-free…
Many global optimization algorithms of the memetic variety rely on some form of stochastic search, and yet they often lack a sound probabilistic basis. Without a recourse to the powerful tools of stochastic calculus, treading the fine…
This paper is devoted to the study of the solution of a stochastic convex black box optimization problem. Where the black box problem means that the gradient-free oracle only returns the value of objective function, not its gradient. We…
In this paper, we present a stochastic gradient algorithm for minimizing a smooth objective function that is an expectation over noisy cost samples, and only the latter are observed for any given parameter. Our algorithm employs a gradient…
Stochastic versions of proximal methods have gained much attention in statistics and machine learning. These algorithms tend to admit simple, scalable forms, and enjoy numerical stability via implicit updates. In this work, we propose and…
We develop a stochastic approximation version of the classical Kaczmarz algorithm that is incremental in nature and takes as input noisy real time data. Our analysis shows that with probability one it mimics the behavior of the original…
In real-time trajectory planning for unmanned vehicles, on-board sensors, radars and other instruments are used to collect information on possible obstacles to be avoided and pathways to be followed. Since, in practice, observations of the…