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The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm allows one to sample asymptotically from any probability distribution $\pi$. There has been recently much work devoted to the development of variants of the MH update which can handle scenarios where such…
The pivot algorithm is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm for simulating the self-avoiding walk. At each iteration a pivot which produces a global change in the walk is proposed. If the resulting walk is self-avoiding, the new walk is…
We revisit the \emph{leaderboard problem} introduced by Blum and Hardt (2015) in an effort to reduce overfitting in machine learning benchmarks. We show that a randomized version of their Ladder algorithm achieves leaderboard error…
Stochastic min-max optimization has gained interest in the machine learning community with the advancements in GANs and adversarial training. Although game optimization is fairly well understood in the deterministic setting, some issues…
Optimal scaling has been well studied for Metropolis-Hastings (M-H) algorithms in continuous spaces, but a similar understanding has been lacking in discrete spaces. Recently, a family of locally balanced proposals (LBP) for discrete spaces…
Scaling pre-trained language models has resulted in large performance gains in various natural language processing tasks but comes with a large cost in memory requirements. Inspired by the position embeddings in transformers, we aim to…
Most real-world optimization problems often come with multiple global optima or local optima. Therefore, increasing niching metaheuristic algorithms, which devote to finding multiple optima in a single run, are developed to solve these…
We prove that the compact genetic algorithm (cGA) with hypothetical population size $\mu = \Omega(\sqrt n \log n) \cap \text{poly}(n)$ with high probability finds the optimum of any $n$-dimensional jump function with jump size $k < \frac 1…
The compact genetic algorithm (cGA) is an non-elitist estimation of distribution algorithm which has shown to be able to deal with difficult multimodal fitness landscapes that are hard to solve by elitist algorithms. In this paper, we…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are the preferred method for solving black-box multi-objective optimization problems, but when gradients of the objective functions are available, it is not straightforward to exploit these efficiently. By…
Selection HHs are randomised search methodologies which choose and execute heuristics during the optimisation process from a set of low-level heuristics. A machine learning mechanism is generally used to decide which low-level heuristic…
Fixed-budget nonconvex optimization can fail not because local descent is unstable, but because it is too stable: after reaching a nearby stationary point, an optimizer may spend the remaining evaluations refining an uninformative local…
Delayed-acceptance Metropolis-Hastings and delayed-acceptance pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings algorithms can be applied when it is computationally expensive to calculate the true posterior or an unbiased stochastic approximation…
We consider the problem of detecting jumps in an otherwise smoothly evolving trend whilst the covariance and higher-order structures of the system can experience both smooth and abrupt changes over time. The number of jump points is allowed…
The major difficulty in Multi-objective Optimization Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) is how to find an appropriate solution that is able to converge towards the true Pareto Front with high diversity. Most existing methodologies, which have…
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown remarkable capabilities in robotic manipulation, but their performance is sensitive to the $\textbf{action chunk length}$ used during training, termed $\textbf{horizon}$. Our empirical study…
While the theoretical analysis of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) has made significant progress for pseudo-Boolean optimization problems in the last 25 years, only sporadic theoretical results exist on how EAs solve permutation-based…
We show that molecular dynamics based moves in the Minima Hopping (MH) method are more efficient than saddle point crossing moves which select the lowest possible saddle point. For binary systems we incorporate identity exchange moves in a…
Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) employing hypermutations with linear static mutation potential have recently been shown to be very effective at escaping local optima of combinatorial optimisation problems at the expense of being slower…
We propose and analyze a self-adaptive version of the $(1,\lambda)$ evolutionary algorithm in which the current mutation rate is part of the individual and thus also subject to mutation. A rigorous runtime analysis on the OneMax benchmark…