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Bayesian optimisation has proven to be a powerful tool for expensive global black-box optimisation problems. In this paper, we propose new Bayesian optimisation variants of the popular Knowledge Gradient acquisition functions for problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Xietao Wang Lin , Juan Ungredda , Max Butler , James Town , Alma Rahat , Hemant Singh , Juergen Branke

Research on new optimization algorithms is often funded based on the motivation that such algorithms might improve the capabilities to deal with real-world and industrially relevant optimization challenges. Besides a huge variety of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Ramses Sala , Ralf Müller

We study the problem of black-box optimization of a noisy function in the presence of low-cost approximations or fidelities, which is motivated by problems like hyper-parameter tuning. In hyper-parameter tuning evaluating the black-box…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-25 Rajat Sen , Kirthevasan Kandasamy , Sanjay Shakkottai

Black-box global optimization aims at minimizing an objective function whose analytical form is not known. To do so, many state-of-the-art methods rely on sampling-based strategies, where sampling distributions are built in an iterative…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-30 Thomas Guilmeau , Emilie Chouzenoux , Víctor Elvira

Parallel black box optimization consists in estimating the optimum of a function using $\lambda$ parallel evaluations of $f$. Averaging the $\mu$ best individuals among the $\lambda$ evaluations is known to provide better estimates of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-11 Laurent Meunier , Iskander Legheraba , Yann Chevaleyre , Olivier Teytaud

Black-box optimization is essential for tuning complex machine learning algorithms which are easier to experiment with than to understand. In this paper, we show that a simple ensemble of black-box optimization algorithms can outperform any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Jiwei Liu , Bojan Tunguz , Gilberto Titericz

We propose a new black-box complexity model for search algorithms evaluating $\lambda$ search points in parallel. The parallel unary unbiased black-box complexity gives lower bounds on the number of function evaluations every parallel unary…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-02-04 Per Kristian Lehre , Dirk Sudholt

Bayesian optimization (BO) and its batch extensions are successful for optimizing expensive black-box functions. However, these traditional BO approaches are not yet ideal for optimizing less expensive functions when the computational cost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Vu Nguyen , Sunil Gupta , Santu Rana , Cheng Li , Svetha Venkatesh

The use of blackbox solvers inside neural networks is a relatively new area which aims to improve neural network performance by including proven, efficient solvers for complex problems. Existing work has created methods for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 T. J. Wilder

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…

Black-box optimization refers to the optimization problem whose objective function and/or constraint sets are either unknown, inaccessible, or non-existent. In many applications, especially with the involvement of humans, the only way to…

The optimization of expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions over combinatorial structures is an ubiquitous task in machine learning, engineering and the natural sciences. The combinatorial explosion of the search space and costly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-11 Ricardo Baptista , Matthias Poloczek

In black-box optimization, a central question is which algorithm to use to solve a given, previously unseen, problem. Selecting a single algorithm, however, entails inherent risks: inaccuracies in the selector may lead to poor choices, and…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Catalin-Viorel Dinu , Diederick Vermetten , Carola Doerr

Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Marius Memmel , Puze Liu , Davide Tateo , Jan Peters

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful approach for seeking the global optimum of expensive black-box functions and has proven successful for fine tuning hyper-parameters of machine learning models. However, BO is practically limited to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-28 Riccardo Moriconi , Marc P. Deisenroth , K. S. Sesh Kumar

In real-time systems optimization, designers often face a challenging problem posed by the non-convex and non-continuous schedulability conditions, which may even lack an analytical form to understand their properties. To tackle this…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-20 Sen Wang , Dong Li , Shao-Yu Huang , Xuanliang Deng , Ashrarul H. Sifat , Changhee Jung , Ryan Williams , Haibo Zeng

For a wide range of applications the structure of systems like Neural Networks or complex simulations, is unknown and approximation is costly or even impossible. Black-box optimization seeks to find optimal (hyper-) parameters for these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Janina Schreiber , Damar Wicaksono , Michael Hecht

Many real-world design problems involve optimizing an expensive black-box function $f(x)$, such as hardware design or drug discovery. Bayesian Optimization has emerged as a sample-efficient framework for this problem. However, the basic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Arjun Mani , Carl Vondrick , Richard Zemel

Black-box optimization is increasingly used in engineering design problems where simulation-based evaluations are costly and gradients are unavailable. In this context, the optimization community has largely analyzed algorithm performance…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Iván Olarte Rodríguez , Gokhan Serhat , Mariusz Bujny , Fabian Duddeck , Thomas Bäck , Elena Raponi

Model-based sequential approaches to discrete "black-box" optimization, including Bayesian optimization techniques, often access the same points multiple times for a given objective function in interest, resulting in many steps to find the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Keisuke Morita , Yoshihiko Nishikawa , Masayuki Ohzeki