Related papers: The Hessian Estimation Evolution Strategy

The zeroth-order optimization has been widely used in machine learning applications. However, the theoretical study of the zeroth-order optimization focus on the algorithms which approximate (first-order) gradients using (zeroth-order)…

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…

The performance of evolutionary algorithms can be heavily undermined when constraints limit the feasible areas of the search space. For instance, while Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy is one of the most efficient algorithms…

Nonconvex minimization algorithms often benefit from the use of second-order information as represented by the Hessian matrix. When the Hessian at a critical point possesses negative eigenvalues, the corresponding eigenvectors can be used…

We explore the use of Evolution Strategies (ES), a class of black box optimization algorithms, as an alternative to popular MDP-based RL techniques such as Q-learning and Policy Gradients. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari show that ES is a…

The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is an efficient continuous black-box optimization method. The CMA-ES possesses many attractive features, including invariance properties and a well-tuned default hyperparameter…

Multi-objective optimization problems whose objectives have different evaluation costs are commonly seen in the real world. Such problems are now known as multi-objective optimization problems with heterogeneous objectives (HE-MOPs). So…

The Increasing Population Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (IPOP-CMA-ES) algorithm is a reference stochastic optimizer dedicated to blackbox optimization, where no prior knowledge about the underlying problem structure is…

Modern machine learning uses more and more advanced optimization techniques to find optimal hyper parameters. Whenever the objective function is non-convex, non continuous and with potentially multiple local minima, standard gradient…

Optimum implementation of non-conventional wells allows us to increase considerably hydrocarbon recovery. By considering the high drilling cost and the potential improvement in well productivity, well placement decision is an important…

We propose a multi-objective optimization algorithm aimed at achieving good anytime performance over a wide range of problems. Performance is assessed in terms of the hypervolume metric. The algorithm called HMO-CMA-ES represents a hybrid…

When faced with a specific optimization problem, choosing which algorithm to use is always a tough task. Not only is there a vast variety of algorithms to select from, but these algorithms often are controlled by many hyperparameters, which…

Zeroth-order optimization is an important research topic in machine learning. In recent years, it has become a key tool in black-box adversarial attack to neural network based image classifiers. However, existing zeroth-order optimization…

Black-box optimization problems often require simultaneously optimizing different types of variables, such as continuous, integer, and categorical variables. Unlike integer variables, categorical variables do not necessarily have a…

The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is widely accepted as a robust derivative-free continuous optimization algorithm for non-linear and non-convex optimization problems. CMA-ES is well known to be almost…

High-dimensional portfolio optimization faces significant computational challenges under complex constraints, with traditional optimization methods struggling to balance convergence speed and global exploration capability. To address this,…

We present a novel algorithm -- convex natural evolutionary strategies (CoNES) -- for optimizing high-dimensional blackbox functions by leveraging tools from convex optimization and information geometry. CoNES is formulated as an…

We present a hybrid algorithm between an evolution strategy and a quasi Newton method. The design is based on the Hessian Estimation Evolution Strategy, which iteratively estimates the inverse square root of the Hessian matrix of the…

We propose a computationally efficient limited memory Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy for large scale optimization, which we call the LM-CMA-ES. The LM-CMA-ES is a stochastic, derivative-free algorithm for numerical…

The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is a stochastic search algorithm using a multivariate normal distribution for continuous black-box optimization. In addition to strong empirical results, part of the CMA-ES can be…