Related papers: Combining Cross Entropy and MADS methods for inequ…
Cross Entropy (CE) has an important role in machine learning and, in particular, in neural networks. It is commonly used in neural networks as the cost between the known distribution of the label and the Softmax/Sigmoid output. In this…
The Improved Cross-Entropy (ICE) method is a powerful tool for estimating failure probabilities in reliability analysis. Its core idea is to approximate the optimal importance-sampling density by minimizing the forward Kullback-Leibler…
In this paper, we provide a new algorithm for the problem of prediction in Reinforcement Learning, \emph{i.e.}, estimating the Value Function of a Markov Reward Process (MRP) using the linear function approximation architecture, with memory…
Current state-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning algorithms use trajectory sampling methods, such as the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM), for planning in continuous control settings. These zeroth-order optimizers require sampling a…
Cross-Entropy Method (CEM) is commonly used for planning in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) where a centralized approach is typically utilized to update the sampling distribution based on only the top-$k$ operation's results on…
Cross-entropy method model predictive control (CEM--MPC) is a powerful gradient-free technique for nonlinear optimal control, but its performance is often limited by the reliance on random sampling. This conventional approach can lead to…
This work provides an efficient sampling method for the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) in large-scale settings. In contract to the Gaussian sampling in CMA-ES, the proposed method generates mutation vectors from a…
Unknown constraints arise in many types of expensive black-box optimization problems. Several methods have been proposed recently for performing Bayesian optimization with constraints, based on the expected improvement (EI) heuristic.…
This work deals with the solution of a non-convex optimization problem to enhance the performance of an energy harvesting device, which involves a nonlinear objective function and a discontinuous constraint. This optimization problem, which…
The study considers the usage of a probabilistic optimization method called Cross-Entropy (CE). This is the version of the Monte Carlo method created by Reuven Rubinstein (1997). It was developed in the context of determining rare events.…
Sampling from constrained distributions has a wide range of applications, including in Bayesian optimization and robotics. Prior work establishes convergence and feasibility guarantees for constrained sampling, but assumes that the feasible…
We employ the Bayesian improved cross entropy (BiCE) method for rare event estimation in static networks and choose the categorical mixture as the parametric family to capture the dependence among network components. At each iteration of…
We develop parallel predictive entropy search (PPES), a novel algorithm for Bayesian optimization of expensive black-box objective functions. At each iteration, PPES aims to select a batch of points which will maximize the information gain…
Water distribution system design is a challenging optimisation problem with a high number of search dimensions and constraints. In this way, Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been widely applied to optimise WDS to minimise cost subject…
This paper introduces CEopt (https://ceopt.org), a MATLAB tool leveraging the Cross-Entropy method for non-convex optimization. Due to the relative simplicity of the algorithm, it provides a kind of transparent ``gray-box'' optimization…
In practical applications of regression analysis, it is not uncommon to encounter a multitude of values for each attribute. In such a situation, the univariate distribution, which is typically Gaussian, is suboptimal because the mean may be…
Automating the design of microstrip antennas has been an active area of research for the past decade. By leveraging machine learning techniques such as Genetic Algorithms (GAs) or, more recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), a number of…
The maximum-entropy sampling problem is a fundamental and challenging combinatorial-optimization problem, with application in spatial statistics. It asks to find a maximum-determinant order-$s$ principal submatrix of an order-$n$ covariance…
Determining optimal well placements and controls are two important tasks in oil field development. These problems are computationally expensive, nonconvex, and contain multiple optima. The practical solution of these problems require…
High-dimensional classification has become an increasingly important problem. In this paper we propose a "Multivariate Adaptive Stochastic Search" (MASS) approach which first reduces the dimension of the data space and then applies a…