Related papers: Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolutionary Strategy…

The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is a stochastic search algorithm using a multivariate normal distribution for continuous black-box optimization. In addition to strong empirical results, part of the CMA-ES can be…

Water distribution system design is a challenging optimisation problem with a high number of search dimensions and constraints. In this way, Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been widely applied to optimise WDS to minimise cost subject…

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…

Evolution strategies (ESs) are zeroth-order stochastic black-box optimization heuristics invariant to monotonic transformations of the objective function. They evolve a multivariate normal distribution, from which candidate solutions are…

Restart strategy helps the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) to increase the probability of finding the global optimum in optimization, while a single run CMA-ES is easy to be trapped in local optima. In this paper,…

Single-objective optimization algorithms search for the single highest-quality solution with respect to an objective. Quality diversity (QD) optimization algorithms, such as Covariance Matrix Adaptation MAP-Elites (CMA-ME), search for a…

We present the results of a comprehensive study of optimization algorithms for the calibration of quantum devices. As part of our ongoing efforts to automate bring-up, tune-up, and system identification procedures, we investigate a broad…

Contextual policy search (CPS) is a class of multi-task reinforcement learning algorithms that is particularly useful for robotic applications. A recent state-of-the-art method is Contextual Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategies…

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…

This paper explores the theoretical basis of the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) from the information geometry viewpoint. To establish a theoretical foundation for the CMA-ES, we focus on a geometric structure of a…

The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) has been the most successful Evolution Strategy at exploiting covariance information; it uses a form of Principle Component Analysis which, under certain conditions, is suggested…

Several practical applications of evolutionary computation possess objective functions that receive the design variables and externally given parameters. Such problems are termed contextual optimization problems. These problems require…

Black-box optimization problems often require simultaneously optimizing different types of variables, such as continuous, integer, and categorical variables. Unlike integer variables, categorical variables do not necessarily have a…

This paper proposes RCMAES, a novel variant of the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) for CEC benchmark optimization. RCMAES integrates a dimension-dependent nonlinear population-size reduction strategy with an…

Pre-training a diverse set of neural network controllers in simulation has enabled robots to adapt online to damage in robot locomotion tasks. However, finding diverse, high-performing controllers requires expensive network training and…

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…

Experimental robot optimization often requires evaluating each candidate policy for seconds to minutes. The chosen evaluation time influences optimization because of a speed-accuracy tradeoff: shorter evaluations enable faster iteration,…

Min-max optimization is emerging as a key framework for analyzing problems of robustness to strategically and adversarially generated data. We propose a random reshuffling-based gradient free Optimistic Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithm for…

We introduce an acceleration for covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategies (CMA-ES) by means of adaptive diagonal decoding (dd-CMA). This diagonal acceleration endows the default CMA-ES with the advantages of separable CMA-ES…

When faced with a specific optimization problem, choosing which algorithm to use is always a tough task. Not only is there a vast variety of algorithms to select from, but these algorithms often are controlled by many hyperparameters, which…