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Black-box optimization (BBO) has a broad range of applications, including automatic machine learning, engineering, physics, and experimental design. However, it remains a challenge for users to apply BBO methods to their problems at hand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Yang Li , Yu Shen , Wentao Zhang , Yuanwei Chen , Huaijun Jiang , Mingchao Liu , Jiawei Jiang , Jinyang Gao , Wentao Wu , Zhi Yang , Ce Zhang , Bin Cui

Combinatorial optimization (CO) is one of the most fundamental mathematical models in real-world applications. Traditional CO solvers, such as Branch-and-Bound (B&B) solvers, heavily rely on expert-designed heuristics, which are reliable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Hongyu Liu , Haoyang Liu , Yufei Kuang , Jie Wang , Bin Li

In recent years, neuro-symbolic methods have become a popular and powerful approach that augments artificial intelligence systems with the capability to perform abstract, logical, and quantitative deductions with enhanced precision and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Yuxuan Wu , Hideki Nakayama

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Carlos Ansotegui , Meinolf Sellmann , Tapan Shah , Kevin Tierney

The selection of the most appropriate algorithm to solve a given problem instance, known as algorithm selection, is driven by the potential to capitalize on the complementary performance of different algorithms across sets of problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Gjorgjina Cenikj , Ana Nikolikj , Gašper Petelin , Niki van Stein , Carola Doerr , Tome Eftimov

Many real-time systems require the optimization of discrete variables. Black-box optimization (BBO) algorithms and multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms perform optimization by repeatedly taking actions and observing the corresponding instant…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tomoya Kashimata , Yohei Hamakawa , Masaya Yamasaki , Kosuke Tatsumura

Black-box optimization (BBO) addresses problems where objectives are accessible only through costly queries without gradients or explicit structure. Classical derivative-free methods -- line search, direct search, and model-based solvers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Morteza Kimiaei , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev

Optimizing functions without access to gradients is the remit of black-box methods such as evolution strategies. While highly general, their learning dynamics are often times heuristic and inflexible - exactly the limitations that…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Robert Tjarko Lange , Tom Schaul , Yutian Chen , Tom Zahavy , Valentin Dallibard , Chris Lu , Satinder Singh , Sebastian Flennerhag

Machine-learning methods are gradually being adopted in a wide variety of social, economic, and scientific contexts, yet they are notorious for struggling with exact mathematics. A typical example is computer algebra, which includes tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Lennart Dabelow , Masahito Ueda

Artificial intelligence techniques are increasingly being applied to solve control problems, but often rely on black-box methods without transparent output generation. To improve the interpretability and transparency in control systems,…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Sigur de Vries , Sander Keemink , Marcel van Gerven

In structured prediction, the goal is to jointly predict many output variables that together encode a structured object -- a path in a graph, an entity-relation triple, or an ordering of objects. Such a large output space makes learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-28 Kareem Ahmed , Eric Wang , Kai-Wei Chang , Guy Van den Broeck

One approach for interpreting black-box machine learning models is to find a global approximation of the model using simple interpretable functions, which is called a metamodel (a model of the model). Approximating the black-box with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Mahed Abroshan , Saumitra Mishra , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili

The field of Neural-Symbolic (NeSy) systems is growing rapidly. Proposed approaches show great promise in achieving symbiotic unions of neural and symbolic methods. However, a unifying framework is needed to organize common NeSy modeling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Charles Dickens , Connor Pryor , Changyu Gao , Alon Albalak , Eriq Augustine , William Wang , Stephen Wright , Lise Getoor

Representations for black-box optimisation methods (such as evolutionary algorithms) are traditionally constructed using a delicate manual process. This is in contrast to the representation that maps DNAs to phenotypes in biological…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Milton L. Montero , Erwan Plantec , Eleni Nisioti , Joachim W. Pedersen , Sebastian Risi

Identifying governing equations for a dynamical system is a topic of critical interest across an array of disciplines, from mathematics to engineering to biology. Machine learning -- specifically deep learning -- techniques have shown their…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2026-05-07 Nibodh Boddupalli , Timothy Matchen , Jeff Moehlis

Black box optimization (BBO) focuses on optimizing unknown functions in high-dimensional spaces. In many applications, sampling the unknown function is expensive, imposing a tight sample budget. Ongoing work is making progress on reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Rajalaxmi Rajagopalan , Yu-Lin Wei , Romit Roy Choudhury

Bayesian optimization has been successfully applied to optimize black-box functions where the number of evaluations is severely limited. However, in many real-world applications, it is hard or impossible to know in advance which designs are…

In this work we present a new method of black-box optimization and constraint satisfaction. Existing algorithms that have attempted to solve this problem are unable to consider multiple modes, and are not able to adapt to changes in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Kourosh Hakhamaneshi , Keertana Settaluri , Pieter Abbeel , Vladimir Stojanovic

Noisy labels, inevitably existing in pseudo segmentation labels generated from weak object-level annotations, severely hampers model optimization for semantic segmentation. Previous works often rely on massive hand-crafted losses and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Shenwang Jiang , Jianan Li , Ying Wang , Wenxuan Wu , Jizhou Zhang , Bo Huang , Tingfa Xu

The use of blackbox solvers inside neural networks is a relatively new area which aims to improve neural network performance by including proven, efficient solvers for complex problems. Existing work has created methods for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 T. J. Wilder