Related papers: Info-Evo: Using Information Geometry to Guide Evol…
Evolutionary algorithms, inspired by natural evolution, aim to optimize difficult objective functions without computing derivatives. Here we detail the relationship between population genetics and evolutionary optimization and formulate a…
Recent advances in data-driven evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have demonstrated the potential of leveraging historical data to improve optimization accuracy and adaptability. Despite these advancements, existing methods remain reliant on…
Hyperparameter optimisation is a crucial process in searching the optimal machine learning model. The efficiency of finding the optimal hyperparameter settings has been a big concern in recent researches since the optimisation process could…
Experienced users often have useful knowledge and intuition in solving real-world optimization problems. User knowledge can be formulated as inter-variable relationships to assist an optimization algorithm in finding good solutions faster.…
Optimizing functions without access to gradients is the remit of black-box methods such as evolution strategies. While highly general, their learning dynamics are often times heuristic and inflexible - exactly the limitations that…
Efficient Natural Evolution Strategies (eNES) is a novel alternative to conventional evolutionary algorithms, using the natural gradient to adapt the mutation distribution. Unlike previous methods based on natural gradients, eNES uses a…
We present a canonical way to turn any smooth parametric family of probability distributions on an arbitrary search space $X$ into a continuous-time black-box optimization method on $X$, the \emph{information-geometric optimization} (IGO)…
Many applications in machine learning require optimizing a function whose true gradient is unknown, but where surrogate gradient information (directions that may be correlated with, but not necessarily identical to, the true gradient) is…
Natural Gradient Descent, a second-degree optimization method motivated by the information geometry, makes use of the Fisher Information Matrix instead of the Hessian which is typically used. However, in many cases, the Fisher Information…
Recent work such as AlphaEvolve has shown that combining LLM-driven optimization with evolutionary search can effectively improve programs, prompts, and algorithms across domains. In this paradigm, previously evaluated solutions are reused…
Despite large incentives, ecorrectness in software remains an elusive goal. Declarative programming techniques, where algorithms are derived from a specification of the desired behavior, offer hope to address this problem, since there is a…
Large Language Model (LLM)-guided evolutionary search is increasingly used for automated algorithm discovery, yet most current methods track search progress primarily through executable programs and scalar fitness. Even when…
Iterative optimization is central to modern artificial intelligence (AI) and provides a crucial framework for understanding adaptive systems. This review provides a unified perspective on this subject, bridging classic theory with neural…
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…
Evolution Strategies are inspired in biology and part of a larger research field known as Evolutionary Algorithms. Those strategies perform a random search in the space of admissible functions, aiming to optimize some given objective…
Natural gradient descent is an optimization method traditionally motivated from the perspective of information geometry, and works well for many applications as an alternative to stochastic gradient descent. In this paper we critically…
We propose EVOlutionary Selector (EVOS), an efficient training paradigm for accelerating Implicit Neural Representation (INR). Unlike conventional INR training that feeds all samples through the neural network in each iteration, our…
We propose a novel evolutionary algorithm on bit vectors which derives from the principles of information theory. The information-theoretic evolutionary algorithm (it-EA) iteratively updates a search distribution with two parameters, the…
This paper deals with estimating model parameters in graphical models. We reformulate it as an information geometric optimization problem and introduce a natural gradient descent strategy that incorporates additional meta parameters. We…
Learning-based control algorithms require data collection with abundant supervision for training. Safe exploration algorithms ensure the safety of this data collection process even when only partial knowledge is available. We present a new…