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Bayesian optimization (BO) provides a powerful framework for optimizing black-box, expensive-to-evaluate functions. It is therefore an attractive tool for engineering design problems, typically involving multiple objectives. Thanks to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Navid Ansari , Alireza Javanmardi , Eyke Hüllermeier , Hans-Peter Seidel , Vahid Babaei

We consider black-box optimization in which only an extremely limited number of function evaluations, on the order of around 100, are affordable and the function evaluations must be performed in even fewer batches of a limited number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Carlos Ansotegui , Meinolf Sellmann , Tapan Shah , Kevin Tierney

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a principled approach to molecular design tasks. In this paper we explain three pitfalls of BO which can cause poor empirical performance: an incorrect prior width, over-smoothing, and inadequate acquisition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Austin Tripp , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Black-box optimization (BBO) has a broad range of applications, including automatic machine learning, experimental design, and database knob tuning. However, users still face challenges when applying BBO methods to their problems at hand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Huaijun Jiang , Yu Shen , Yang Li , Beicheng Xu , Sixian Du , Wentao Zhang , Ce Zhang , Bin Cui

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful technology for optimizing noisy expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions, with a broad range of real-world applications in science, engineering, economics, manufacturing, and beyond. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Joel A. Paulson , Calvin Tsay

Bayesian optimization (BO) is an approach to globally optimizing black-box objective functions that are expensive to evaluate. BO-powered experimental design has found wide application in materials science, chemistry, experimental physics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Mimi Zhang , Andrew Parnell , Dermot Brabazon , Alessio Benavoli

Existing studies in black-box optimization for machine learning suffer from low generalizability, caused by a typically selective choice of problem instances used for training and testing different optimization algorithms. Among other…

The growing ubiquity of machine learning (ML) has led it to enter various areas of computer science, including black-box optimization (BBO). Recent research is particularly concerned with Bayesian optimization (BO). BO-based algorithms are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Elena Raponi , Nathanael Rakotonirina Carraz , Jérémy Rapin , Carola Doerr , Olivier Teytaud

While sample efficiency is the main motive for use of Bayesian optimisation when black-box functions are expensive to evaluate, the standard approach based on type II maximum likelihood (ML-II) may fail and result in disappointing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Yuji Saikai

Model merging has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to training large language models (LLMs) from scratch, enabling researchers to combine pre-trained models into more capable systems without full retraining. Evolutionary approaches…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Md. Robiul Islam Niloy

Bayesian optimization (BO) has become an effective approach for black-box function optimization problems when function evaluations are expensive and the optimum can be achieved within a relatively small number of queries. However, many…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-06 Zi Wang , Clement Gehring , Pushmeet Kohli , Stefanie Jegelka

A wide spectrum of design and decision problems, including parameter tuning, A/B testing and drug design, intrinsically are instances of black-box optimization. Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful tool that models and optimizes such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Tianyi Bai , Yang Li , Yu Shen , Xinyi Zhang , Wentao Zhang , Bin Cui

Many key challenges in biological design -- such as small-molecule drug discovery, antimicrobial peptide development, and protein engineering -- can be framed as black-box optimization over vast, complex structured spaces. Existing methods…

Optimization of high-dimensional black-box functions is an extremely challenging problem. While Bayesian optimization has emerged as a popular approach for optimizing black-box functions, its applicability has been limited to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-06 Zi Wang , Chengtao Li , Stefanie Jegelka , Pushmeet Kohli

Directed evolution is a versatile technique in protein engineering that mimics the process of natural selection by iteratively alternating between mutagenesis and screening in order to search for sequences that optimize a given property of…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2024-05-02 Lixue Cheng , Ziyi Yang , Changyu Hsieh , Benben Liao , Shengyu Zhang

Chip placement is a vital stage in modern chip design as it has a substantial impact on the subsequent processes and the overall quality of the final chip. The use of black-box optimization (BBO) for chip placement has a history of several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Ke Xue , Ruo-Tong Chen , Rong-Xi Tan , Xi Lin , Yunqi Shi , Siyuan Xu , Mingxuan Yuan , Chao Qian

Black box optimization (BBO) focuses on optimizing unknown functions in high-dimensional spaces. In many applications, sampling the unknown function is expensive, imposing a tight sample budget. Ongoing work is making progress on reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Rajalaxmi Rajagopalan , Yu-Lin Wei , Romit Roy Choudhury

Optimization is becoming increasingly common in scientific and engineering domains. Oftentimes, these problems involve various levels of stochasticity or uncertainty in generating proposed solutions. Therefore, optimization in these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-05 Peter D. Tonner , Daniel V. Samarov , A. Gilad Kusne

Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) is an emerging avenue within Optimization community, where algorithm design policy could be meta-learned by reinforcement learning to enhance optimization performance. So far, the reward functions in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Zechuan Huang , Zhiguang Cao , Hongshu Guo , Yue-Jiao Gong , Zeyuan Ma

One way to reduce the time of conducting optimization studies is to evaluate designs in parallel rather than just one-at-a-time. For expensive-to-evaluate black-boxes, batch versions of Bayesian optimization have been proposed. They work by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-04 Mickael Binois , Nicholson Collier , Jonathan Ozik