Related papers: How Well Does the Metropolis Algorithm Cope With L…
Hamiltonian dynamics can be used to produce distant proposals for the Metropolis algorithm, thereby avoiding the slow exploration of the state space that results from the diffusive behaviour of simple random-walk proposals. Though…
We consider a recently proposed class of MCMC methods which uses proximity maps instead of gradients to build proposal mechanisms which can be employed for both differentiable and non-differentiable targets. These methods have been shown to…
Traditional MCMC algorithms are computationally intensive and do not scale well to large data. In particular, the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm requires passing over the entire dataset to evaluate the likelihood ratio in each…
The multiple Try Metropolis (MTM) algorithm is an advanced MCMC technique based on drawing and testing several candidates at each iteration of the algorithm. One of them is selected according to certain weights and then it is tested…
Bat Algorithm (BA) is a nature-inspired metaheuristic search algorithm designed to efficiently explore complex problem spaces and find near-optimal solutions. The algorithm is inspired by the echolocation behavior of bats, which acts as a…
The adaptive Metropolis (AM) algorithm of Haario, Saksman and Tamminen [Bernoulli 7 (2001) 223-242] uses the estimated covariance of the target distribution in the proposal distribution. This paper introduces a new robust adaptive…
We establish conditions under which Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithms with a position-dependent proposal covariance matrix will or will not have the geometric rate of convergence. Some of the diffusions based MH algorithms like the…
The hyperclimbing hypothesis is a hypothetical explanation for adaptation in genetic algorithms with uniform crossover (UGAs). Hyperclimbing is an intuitive, general-purpose, non-local search heuristic applicable to discrete product spaces…
Local search algorithms for combinatorial search problems frequently encounter a sequence of states in which it is impossible to improve the value of the objective function; moves through these regions, called plateau moves, dominate the…
This work introduces StoMADS, a stochastic variant of the mesh adaptive direct-search (MADS) algorithm originally developed for deterministic blackbox optimization. StoMADS considers the unconstrained optimization of an objective function f…
Automatically tuning software configuration for optimizing a single performance attribute (e.g., minimizing latency) is not trivial, due to the nature of the configuration systems (e.g., complex landscape and expensive measurement). To deal…
The Metropolis-adjusted Langevin (MALA) algorithm is a sampling algorithm which makes local moves by incorporating information about the gradient of the logarithm of the target density. In this paper we study the efficiency of MALA on a…
Optimization seeks extremal points in a function. When there are superextensively many optima, optimization algorithms are liable to get stuck. Under these conditions, generic algorithms tend to find marginal optima, which have many nearly…
The main challenge of nonconvex optimization is to find a global optimum, or at least to avoid ``bad'' local minima and meaningless stationary points. We study here the extent to which algorithms, as opposed to optimization models and…
The Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) is a widely used Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling from high-dimensional distributions. However, MALA relies on differentiability assumptions that restrict its…
We study the problem of optimizing a function under a \emph{budgeted number of evaluations}. We only assume that the function is \emph{locally} smooth around one of its global optima. The difficulty of optimization is measured in terms of…
We present multi-agent A* (MAA*), the first complete and optimal heuristic search algorithm for solving decentralized partially-observable Markov decision problems (DEC-POMDPs) with finite horizon. The algorithm is suitable for computing…
Multimodality is one of the biggest difficulties for optimization as local optima are often preventing algorithms from making progress. This does not only challenge local strategies that can get stuck. It also hinders meta-heuristics like…
The general applicability and ease of use of the pseudo-marginal Metropolis--Hastings (PMMH) algorithm, and particle Metropolis--Hastings in particular, makes it a popular method for inference on discretely observed Markovian stochastic…
Most successful stochastic black-box optimizers, such as CMA-ES, use rankings of the individual samples to obtain a new search distribution. Yet, the use of rankings also introduces several issues such as the underlying optimization…