Related papers: CMA-ES with Margin: Lower-Bounding Marginal Probab…

Black-box discrete optimization (BB-DO) problems arise in many real-world applications, such as neural architecture search and mathematical model estimation. A key challenge in BB-DO is epistasis among parameters where multiple variables…

Box-constraints limit the domain of decision variables and are common in real-world optimization problems, for example, due to physical, natural or spatial limitations. Consequently, solutions violating a box-constraint may not be…

Efficient optimisation of black-box problems that comprise both continuous and categorical inputs is important, yet poses significant challenges. We propose a new approach, Continuous and Categorical Bayesian Optimisation (CoCaBO), which…

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…

Modern machine learning uses more and more advanced optimization techniques to find optimal hyper parameters. Whenever the objective function is non-convex, non continuous and with potentially multiple local minima, standard gradient…

Mixed-integer extensions of evolution strategies (ES) that discretize selected coordinates of sampled continuous vectors often impose a lower bound on the standard deviation of integer variables to prevent premature convergence. While these…

This work provides an efficient sampling method for the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) in large-scale settings. In contract to the Gaussian sampling in CMA-ES, the proposed method generates mutation vectors from a…

Existing Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) methods focus on how to search when controlling optimizers, but largely overlook where to search. We propose MetaSG-SAEA, a bi-level MetaBBO framework for expensive constrained multi-objective…

In the post-Moore era, main performance gains of black-box optimizers are increasingly depending on parallelism, especially for large-scale optimization (LSO). Here we propose to parallelize the well-established covariance matrix adaptation…

Various variants of the well known Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) have been proposed recently, which improve the empirical performance of the original algorithm by structural modifications. However, in practice it…

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is an effective method for finding the global optimum of expensive black-box functions. However, it is well known that applying BO to high-dimensional optimization problems is challenging. To address this issue, a…

This paper introduces a novel theoretically sound approach for the celebrated CMA-ES algorithm. Assuming the parameters of the multi variate normal distribution for the minimum follow a conjugate prior distribution, we derive their optimal…

Hyperparameter optimization (HPO), formulated as black-box optimization (BBO), is recognized as essential for automation and high performance of machine learning approaches. The CMA-ES is a promising BBO approach with a high degree of…

Discrete black-box optimization problems are challenging for model-based optimization (MBO) algorithms, such as Bayesian optimization, due to the size of the search space and the need to satisfy combinatorial constraints. In particular,…

The optimization of expensive to evaluate, black-box, mixed-variable functions, i.e. functions that have continuous and discrete inputs, is a difficult and yet pervasive problem in science and engineering. In Bayesian optimization (BO),…

The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is one of the most successful methods for solving continuous black-box optimization problems. A practically useful aspect of the CMA-ES is that it can be used without…

The Increasing Population Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (IPOP-CMA-ES) algorithm is a reference stochastic optimizer dedicated to blackbox optimization, where no prior knowledge about the underlying problem structure is…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a model-based approach to sequentially optimize expensive black-box functions, such as the validation error of a deep neural network with respect to its hyperparameters. In many real-world scenarios, the…

Many real-world optimisation problems are defined over both categorical and continuous variables, yet efficient optimisation methods such asBayesian Optimisation (BO) are not designed tohandle such mixed-variable search spaces. Recent…

Rather than obtaining a single good solution for a given optimization problem, users often seek alternative design choices, because the best-found solution may perform poorly with respect to additional objectives or constraints that are…