Related papers: EXPObench: Benchmarking Surrogate-based Optimisati…

Offline optimization is a fundamental challenge in science and engineering, where the goal is to optimize black-box functions using only offline datasets. This setting is particularly relevant when querying the objective function is…

Data-driven optimization has found many successful applications in the real world and received increased attention in the field of evolutionary optimization. Most existing algorithms assume that the data used for optimization is always…

There are a large number of optimization problems in physical models where the relationships between model parameters and outputs are unknown or hard to track. These models are named as black-box models in general because they can only be…

Evolutionary algorithms provide gradient-free optimisation which is beneficial for models that have difficulty in obtaining gradients; for instance, geoscientific landscape evolution models. However, such models are at times computationally…

The exploration of novel architectures requires physics-based simulation due to a lack of prior experience to start from, which introduces two specific challenges for optimization algorithms: evaluations become more expensive (in time) and…

Black-box model-based optimization (MBO) problems, where the goal is to find a design input that maximizes an unknown objective function, are ubiquitous in a wide range of domains, such as the design of proteins, DNA sequences, aircraft,…

Real-world problems often involve the optimization of several objectives under multiple constraints. An example is the hyper-parameter tuning problem of machine learning algorithms. In particular, the minimization of the estimation of the…

This paper describes a simple, but effective sampling method for optimizing and learning a discrete approximation (or surrogate) of a multi-dimensional function along a one-dimensional line segment of interest. The method does not rely on…

We consider the problem of offline black-box optimization, where the goal is to discover optimal designs (e.g., molecules or materials) from past experimental data. A key challenge in this setting is data scarcity: in many scientific…

Many expensive black-box optimisation problems are sensitive to their inputs. In these problems it makes more sense to locate a region of good designs, than a single-possibly fragile-optimal design. Expensive black-box functions can be…

Offline optimization has recently emerged as an increasingly popular approach to mitigate the prohibitively expensive cost of online experimentation. The key idea is to learn a surrogate of the black-box function that underlines the target…

As models become increasingly sophisticated, conventional algorithm benchmarks are increasingly saturated, underscoring the need for more challenging benchmarks to guide future improvements in algorithmic reasoning. This paper introduces…

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms have been widely developed to solve complex and computationally expensive multi-objective optimization problems in recent years. However, when dealing with high-dimensional optimization problems,…

Offline optimization is an important task in numerous material engineering domains where online experimentation to collect data is too expensive and needs to be replaced by an in silico maximization of a surrogate of the black-box function.…

The estimation of unknown values of parameters (or hidden variables, control variables) that characterise a physical system often relies on the comparison of measured data with synthetic data produced by some numerical simulator of the…

We propose a novel method for gradient-based optimization of black-box simulators using differentiable local surrogate models. In fields such as physics and engineering, many processes are modeled with non-differentiable simulators with…

Benchmarking has driven scientific progress in Evolutionary Computation, yet current practices fall short of real-world needs. Widely used synthetic suites such as BBOB and CEC isolate algorithmic phenomena but poorly reflect the structure,…

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) are powerful optimisation tools for computationally expensive problems (CEPs). However, a randomly selected algorithm may fail in solving unknown problems due to no free lunch theorems, and…

Addressing real-world optimization challenges requires not only advanced metaheuristics but also continuous refinement of their internal mechanisms. This paper explores the integration of machine learning in the form of neural surrogate…

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) hold significant importance in resolving expensive optimization problems~(EOPs). Extensive efforts have been devoted to improving the efficacy of SAEAs through the development of proficient…