Related papers: Direct-search methods in the year 2025: Theoretica…
Research in derivative-free global optimization is under active development, and many solution techniques are available today. Therefore, the experimental comparison of previous and emerging algorithms must be kept up to date. This paper…
When looking for a solution, deterministic methods have the enormous advantage that they do find global optima. Unfortunately, they are very CPU-intensive, and are useless on untractable NP-hard problems that would require thousands of…
Continuous action policy search is currently the focus of intensive research, driven both by the recent success of deep reinforcement learning algorithms and the emergence of competitors based on evolutionary algorithms. In this paper, we…
This work presents the convergence rate analysis of stochastic variants of the broad class of direct-search methods of directional type. It introduces an algorithm designed to optimize differentiable objective functions $f$ whose values can…
Domain experts often need to extract structured information from large corpora. We advocate for a search paradigm called ``extractive search'', in which a search query is enriched with capture-slots, to allow for such rapid extraction. Such…
Linearizability is a standard correctness criterion for concurrent algorithms, typically proved by establishing the algorithms' linearization points. However, relying on linearization points leads to proofs that are…
A randomized version of the recently developed barycenter method for derivative--free optimization has desirable properties of a gradient search. We developed a complex version to avoid evaluations at high--gradient points. The method,…
Decision tree learning is a widely used approach in machine learning, favoured in applications that require concise and interpretable models. Heuristic methods are traditionally used to quickly produce models with reasonably high accuracy.…
In this work, we deal with unconstrained nonlinear optimization problems. Specifically, we are interested in methods carrying out updates possibly along directions not of descent, like Polyak's heavy-ball algorithm. Instead of enforcing…
In this work, we consider smooth unconstrained optimization problems and we deal with the class of gradient methods with momentum, i.e., descent algorithms where the search direction is defined as a linear combination of the current…
We study derivative-free methods for policy optimization over the class of linear policies. We focus on characterizing the convergence rate of these methods when applied to linear-quadratic systems, and study various settings of driving…
On one hand, compared with traditional relational and XML models, graphs have more expressive power and are widely used today. On the other hand, various applications of social computing trigger the pressing need of a new search paradigm.…
Heuristic forward search is currently the dominant paradigm in classical planning. Forward search algorithms typically rely on a single, relatively simple variation of best-first search and remain fixed throughout the process of solving a…
Classic algorithms and machine learning systems like neural networks are both abundant in everyday life. While classic computer science algorithms are suitable for precise execution of exactly defined tasks such as finding the shortest path…
The saturation-based reasoning methods are among the most theoretically developed ones and are used by most of the state-of-the-art first-order logic reasoners. In the last decade there was a sharp increase in performance of such systems,…
This research paper presents a novel approach to enhance optimization performance through the hybridization of Gaussian Crunching Search (GCS) and Powell's Method for derivative-free optimization. While GCS has shown promise in overcoming…
Robust optimization has been established as a leading methodology to approach decision problems under uncertainty. To derive a robust optimization model, a central ingredient is to identify a suitable model for uncertainty, which is called…
Nonlinear conjugate gradients are among the most popular techniques for solving continuous optimization problems. Although these schemes have long been studied from a global convergence standpoint, their worst-case complexity properties…
In this paper, we present a novel derivative-free optimization framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Many problems in fields ranging from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning involve settings…
In this paper, we develop convergence analysis of a modified line search method for objective functions whose value is computed with noise and whose gradient estimates are inexact and possibly random. The noise is assumed to be bounded in…