Related papers: LineWalker: Line Search for Black Box Derivative-F…

We consider the problem of approximating an unknown function from point evaluations. This problem is a crucial subproblem in many modern (nonlinear) approximation schemes. When obtaining these point evaluations is costly, minimising the…

Black-box optimization refers to the optimization problem whose objective function and/or constraint sets are either unknown, inaccessible, or non-existent. In many applications, especially with the involvement of humans, the only way to…

We study the problem of minimizing a convex function on a nonempty, finite subset of the integer lattice when the function cannot be evaluated at noninteger points. We propose a new underestimator that does not require access to…

This paper studies the black-box optimization task which aims to find the maxima of a black-box function using a static set of its observed input-output pairs. This is often achieved via learning and optimizing a surrogate function with…

Derivative-Free Optimization (DFO) involves methods that rely solely on evaluations of the objective function. One of the earliest strategies for designing DFO methods is to adapt first-order methods by replacing gradients with…

Sampling techniques are used in many fields, including design of experiments, image processing, and graphics. The techniques in each field are designed to meet the constraints specific to that field such as uniform coverage of the range of…

In recent years, solving optimization problems involving black-box simulators has become a point of focus for the machine learning community due to their ubiquity in science and engineering. The simulators describe a forward process…

Surrogate models are used to alleviate the computational burden in engineering tasks, which require the repeated evaluation of computationally demanding models of physical systems, such as the efficient propagation of uncertainties. For…

Derivative-free optimization algorithms are particularly useful for tackling blackbox optimization problems where the objective function arises from complex and expensive procedures that preclude the use of classical gradient-based methods.…

This paper is concerned with the approximation of continuously differentiable functions with high-dimensional input by a composition of two functions: a feature map that extracts few features from the input space, and a profile function…

A surrogate-based topology optimisation algorithm for linear elastic structures under parametric loads and boundary conditions is proposed. Instead of learning the parametric solution of the state (and adjoint) problems or the optimisation…

Carefully designed activation functions can improve the performance of neural networks in many machine learning tasks. However, it is difficult for humans to construct optimal activation functions, and current activation function search…

We consider black-box optimization in which only an extremely limited number of function evaluations, on the order of around 100, are affordable and the function evaluations must be performed in even fewer batches of a limited number of…

Bayesian optimization (BO) has well-documented merits for optimizing black-box functions with an expensive evaluation cost. Such functions emerge in applications as diverse as hyperparameter tuning, drug discovery, and robotics. BO hinges…

Many important problems in science and engineering, such as drug design, involve optimizing an expensive black-box objective function over a complex, high-dimensional, and structured input space. Although machine learning techniques have…

Parallel black box optimization consists in estimating the optimum of a function using $\lambda$ parallel evaluations of $f$. Averaging the $\mu$ best individuals among the $\lambda$ evaluations is known to provide better estimates of the…

Inexpensive surrogates are useful for reducing the cost of science and engineering studies involving large-scale, complex computational models with many input parameters. A ridge approximation is one class of surrogate that models a…

How can robots learn and adapt to new tasks and situations with little data? Systematic exploration and simulation are crucial tools for efficient robot learning. We present a novel black-box policy search algorithm focused on…

This paper proposes a technique for training a neural network by minimizing a surrogate loss that approximates the target evaluation metric, which may be non-differentiable. The surrogate is learned via a deep embedding where the Euclidean…

Explainable AI is a crucial component for edge services, as it ensures reliable decision making based on complex AI models. Surrogate models are a prominent approach of XAI where human-interpretable models, such as a linear regression…