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Interpretability has become incredibly important as machine learning is increasingly used to inform consequential decisions. We propose to construct global explanations of complex, blackbox models in the form of a decision tree…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-28 Osbert Bastani , Carolyn Kim , Hamsa Bastani

Many problems in machine learning are naturally expressed in the language of undirected graphical models. Here, we propose black-box learning and inference algorithms for undirected models that optimize a variational approximation to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-20 Volodymyr Kuleshov , Stefano Ermon

In many optimization problems arising from scientific, engineering and artificial intelligence applications, objective and constraint functions are available only as the output of a black-box or simulation oracle that does not provide…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-08-15 Jeffrey Larson , Matt Menickelly , Stefan M. Wild

Black-box alpha (BB-$\alpha$) is a new approximate inference method based on the minimization of $\alpha$-divergences. BB-$\alpha$ scales to large datasets because it can be implemented using stochastic gradient descent. BB-$\alpha$ can be…

Optimization problems with uncertain black-box constraints, modeled by warped Gaussian processes, have recently been considered in the Bayesian optimization setting. This work introduces a new class of constraints in which the same…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-16 Johannes Wiebe , Inês Cecílio , Jonathan Dunlop , Ruth Misener

Many real-life problems are represented as a black-box, i.e., the internal workings are inaccessible or a closed-form mathematical expression of the likelihood function cannot be defined. For continuous random variables likelihood-free…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-21 Ilze Amanda Auzina , Jakub M. Tomczak

We present a meta-algorithm for learning a posterior-inference algorithm for restricted probabilistic programs. Our meta-algorithm takes a training set of probabilistic programs that describe models with observations, and attempts to learn…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Gwonsoo Che , Hongseok Yang

Algorithmic fairness has become a central concern in modern machine learning and AI applications. However, two pressing challenges remain: (1) The fairness guarantees of existing methods often rely on specific data distributional…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Xiaotian Hou , Linjun Zhang

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) now sees widespread use in machine learning and statistics as a fast yet flexible alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, stochastic optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-22 Manushi Welandawe , Michael Riis Andersen , Aki Vehtari , Jonathan H. Huggins

We provide a computationally efficient black-box reduction from mechanism design to algorithm design in very general settings. Specifically, we give an approximation-preserving reduction from truthfully maximizing \emph{any} objective under…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-05-20 Yang Cai , Constantinos Daskalakis , S. Matthew Weinberg

When gradient-based methods are impractical, black-box optimization (BBO) provides a valuable alternative. However, BBO often struggles with high-dimensional problems and limited trial budgets. In this work, we propose a novel approach…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Riccardo Busetto , Manas Mejari , Marco Forgione , Alberto Bemporad , Dario Piga

In modern data analysis, it is common to use machine learning methods to predict outcomes on unlabeled datasets and then use these pseudo-outcomes in subsequent statistical inference. Inference in this setting is often called…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-04 Feng Gan , Wanfeng Liang , Changliang Zou

Revealing the functional sites of biological sequences, such as evolutionary conserved, structurally interacting or co-evolving protein sites, is a fundamental, and yet challenging task. Different frameworks and models were developed to…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2019-06-07 Justas Dauparas , Haobo Wang , Avi Swartz , Peter Koo , Mor Nitzan , Sergey Ovchinnikov

Generating rationales that justify scoring decisions has been a promising way to facilitate explainability in automated scoring systems. However, existing methods do not match the accuracy of classifier-based methods. Plus, the generated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Jiazheng Li , Hainiu Xu , Zhaoyue Sun , Yuxiang Zhou , David West , Cesare Aloisi , Yulan He

High-dimensional black-box optimisation remains an important yet notoriously challenging problem. Despite the success of Bayesian optimisation methods on continuous domains, domains that are categorical, or that mix continuous and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-11 Xingchen Wan , Vu Nguyen , Huong Ha , Binxin Ru , Cong Lu , Michael A. Osborne

Bayesian methods are particularly effective for addressing inverse problems due to their ability to manage uncertainties inherent in the inference process. However, employing these methods with costly forward models poses significant…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-10-30 G. Robalo Rei , C. P. Schmidt , J. Nitzler , M. Dinkel , W. A. Wall

We consider the optimization of an uncertain objective over continuous and multi-dimensional decision spaces in problems in which we are only provided with observational data. We propose a novel algorithmic framework that is tractable,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Dimitris Bertsimas , Christopher McCord

Some real-world problems revolve to solve the optimization problem \max_{x\in\mathcal{X}}f\left(x\right) where f\left(.\right) is a black-box function and X might be the set of non-vectorial objects (e.g., distributions) where we can only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-09-20 Trung Le , Khanh Nguyen , Tu Dinh Nguyen , Dinh Phung

In real-world applications, users often favor structurally diverse design choices over one high-quality solution. It is hence important to consider more solutions that decision makers can compare and further explore based on additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Maria Laura Santoni , Elena Raponi , Aneta Neumann , Frank Neumann , Mike Preuss , Carola Doerr

The pursuit of universal black-box optimization (BBO) algorithms is a longstanding goal. However, unlike domains such as language or vision, where scaling structured data has driven generalization, progress in offline BBO remains hindered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Rong-Xi Tan , Ming Chen , Ke Xue , Yao Wang , Yaoyuan Wang , Sheng Fu , Chao Qian