Related papers: Natural Evolution Strategy for Unconstrained and I…
Cell-Free Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are investigated with the support of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). The RIS phase shifts are designed for improved channel estimation in the presence of spatial…
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…
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…
Evolutionary algorithms are particularly effective for optimisation problems with dynamic and stochastic components. We propose multi-objective evolutionary approaches for the knapsack problem with stochastic profits under static and…
One of the most challenging problems in evolutionary computation is to select from its family of diverse solvers one that performs well on a given problem. This algorithm selection problem is complicated by the fact that different phases of…
To solve large-scale or high-resolution topology optimization problem, a novel algorithm is developed based on modified bi-directional evolutionary structure optimization (BESO) and extended finite element method (XFEM). Within XFEM, a set…
Bilinear Matrix Inequalities (BMIs) are fundamental to control system design but are notoriously difficult to solve due to their nonconvexity. This study addresses BMI-based control optimization problems by adapting and integrating advanced…
The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is a popular method to deal with nonconvex and/or stochastic optimization problems when the gradient information is not available. Being based on the CMA-ES, the recently proposed…
Evolution Strategy (ES) is a powerful black-box optimization technique based on the idea of natural evolution. In each of its iterations, a key step entails ranking candidate solutions based on some fitness score. For an ES method in…
Existing evolutionary algorithms for Constrained Multi-objective Optimization Problems (CMOPs) typically treat all constraints uniformly, overlooking their distinct geometric relationships with the true Constrained Pareto Front (CPF). In…
The key to Black-Box Optimization is to efficiently search through input regions with potentially widely-varying numerical properties, to achieve low-regret descent and fast progress toward the optima. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods…
This study targets the mixed-integer black-box optimization (MI-BBO) problem where continuous and integer variables should be optimized simultaneously. The CMA-ES, our focus in this study, is a population-based stochastic search method that…
In this study, we investigate the problem of min-max continuous optimization in a black-box setting $\min_{x} \max_{y}f(x,y)$. A popular approach updates $x$ and $y$ simultaneously or alternatingly. However, two major limitations have been…
In this study, we consider a continuous min--max optimization problem $\min_{x \in \mathbb{X} \max_{y \in \mathbb{Y}}}f(x,y)$ whose objective function is a black-box. We propose a novel approach to minimize the worst-case objective function…
Most successful stochastic black-box optimizers, such as CMA-ES, use rankings of the individual samples to obtain a new search distribution. Yet, the use of rankings also introduces several issues such as the underlying optimization…
We propose two novel algorithms for constructing convex collision-free polytopes in robot configuration space. Finding these polytopes enables the application of stronger motion-planning frameworks such as trajectory optimization with…
Continuous optimization is an important problem in many areas of AI, including vision, robotics, probabilistic inference, and machine learning. Unfortunately, most real-world optimization problems are nonconvex, causing standard convex…
Natural gradients have long been studied in deep reinforcement learning due to their fast convergence properties and covariant weight updates. However, computing natural gradients requires inversion of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) at…
We propose a novel constraint-handling technique for the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES). The proposed technique is aimed at solving explicitly constrained black-box continuous optimization problems, in which the…
Evolutionary multi-objective algorithms have been widely shown to be successful when utilized for a variety of stochastic combinatorial optimization problems. Chance constrained optimization plays an important role in complex real-world…