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Sequential robot manipulation tasks require finding collision-free trajectories that satisfy geometric constraints across multiple object interactions in potentially high-dimensional configuration spaces. Solving these problems in real-time…
Effective general-purpose search strategies are an important component in Constraint Programming. We introduce a new idea, namely, using correlations between variables to guide search. Variable correlations are measured and maintained by…
In this work we explore the combination of metaheuristics and learned neural network solvers for combinatorial optimization. We do this in the context of the transit network design problem, a uniquely challenging combinatorial optimization…
Breaking down a problem into intermediate steps has demonstrated impressive performance in Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. However, the growth of the reasoning chain introduces uncertainty and error accumulation, making it challenging…
Existing high-dimensional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods aim to overcome the curse of dimensionality by carefully encoding structural assumptions, from locality to sparsity to smoothness, into the optimization procedure. Surprisingly,…
When solving real-world problems, practitioners often hesitate to implement solutions obtained from mathematical models, especially for important decisions. This hesitation stems from practitioners' lack of trust in optimization models and…
This research paper presents a novel approach to enhance optimization performance through the hybridization of Gaussian Crunching Search (GCS) and Powell's Method for derivative-free optimization. While GCS has shown promise in overcoming…
Local search is an effective method for solving large-scale combinatorial optimization problems, and it has made remarkable progress in recent years through several subtle mechanisms. In this paper, we found two ways to improve the local…
Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithms form a class of surrogate-based heuristics, aimed at efficiently computing high-quality solutions for numerical black-box optimization problems. The BO pipeline is highly modular, with different design…
As we approach the physical limits predicted by Moore's law, a variety of specialized hardware is emerging to tackle specialized tasks in different domains. Within combinatorial optimization, adiabatic quantum computers, CMOS annealers, and…
Nowadays, we are immersed in tens of newly-proposed evolutionary and swam-intelligence metaheuristics, which makes it very difficult to choose a proper one to be applied on a specific optimization problem at hand. On the other hand, most of…
Search has been proposed as an effective method for self-improving language models and agentic systems, both for post-training sample generation and for inference. However, widely used methods such as best-of-N sampling and tree search face…
This work considers infinite-horizon optimal control of positive linear systems applied to the case of network routing problems. We demonstrate the equivalence between Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problems and optimal control of a certain…
Branch-and-bound is a systematic enumerative method for combinatorial optimization, where the performance highly relies on the variable selection strategy. State-of-the-art handcrafted heuristic strategies suffer from relatively slow…
Bayesian Optimisation (BO) refers to a class of methods for global optimisation of a function $f$ which is only accessible via point evaluations. It is typically used in settings where $f$ is expensive to evaluate. A common use case for BO…
The rapid advancement of GPU technology has unlocked powerful parallel processing capabilities, creating new opportunities to enhance classic search algorithms. This hardware has been exploited in best-first search algorithms with neural…
This article explores the integration of deep learning models into combinatorial optimization pipelines, specifically targeting NP-hard problems. Traditional exact algorithms for such problems often rely on heuristic criteria to guide the…
Symbolic regression aims to discover human-interpretable equations that explain observational data. However, existing approaches rely heavily on discrete structure search (e.g., genetic programming), which often leads to high computational…
Several fundamental problems in science and engineering consist of global optimization tasks involving unknown high-dimensional (black-box) functions that map a set of controllable variables to the outcomes of an expensive experiment.…
In safety-critical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles and robots), Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are becoming a key component for computer vision tasks, particularly semantic segmentation. Further, since the DNN behavior cannot be assessed…