Related papers: Direct-search methods in the year 2025: Theoretica…
Understanding and creating mathematics using natural mathematical language - the mixture of symbolic and natural language used by humans - is a challenging and important problem for driving progress in machine learning. As a step in this…
In this paper, a new variant of accelerated gradient descent is proposed. The pro-posed method does not require any information about the objective function, usesexact line search for the practical accelerations of convergence, converges…
We introduce a derivative-free global optimization algorithm that efficiently computes minima for various classes of one-dimensional functions, including non-convex, and non-smooth functions.This algorithm numerically approximates the…
The problem of finding global minima of nonlinear discrete functions arises in many fields of practical matters. In recent years, methods based on discrete filled functions become popular as ways of solving these sort of problems. However,…
We introduce the first direct policy search algorithm which provably converges to the globally optimal $\textit{dynamic}$ filter for the classical problem of predicting the outputs of a linear dynamical system, given noisy, partial…
Decision theories offer principled methods for making choices under various types of uncertainty. Algorithms that implement these theories have been successfully applied to a wide range of real-world problems, including materials and drug…
Concept-based explanation methods aim at making machine learning models more transparent by finding the most important semantic features of an input (e.g., colors, patterns, shapes) for a given prediction task. However, these methods…
In data-driven optimization, solution feasibility is often ensured through a "safe" reformulation of the uncertain constraints, such that an obtained data-driven solution is guaranteed to be feasible for the oracle formulation with high…
Increasing amounts of available data have led to a heightened need for representing large-scale probabilistic knowledge bases. One approach is to use a probabilistic database, a model with strong assumptions that allow for efficiently…
A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…
Iteration methods based on barycentric rational interpolation are derived that exhibit accelerating orders of convergence. For univariate root search, the derivative-free methods approach quadratic convergence and the first-derivative…
In this paper, we revisit model-free policy search on an important robust control benchmark, namely $\mu$-synthesis. In the general output-feedback setting, there do not exist convex formulations for this problem, and hence global…
Mappings to structured output spaces (strings, trees, partitions, etc.) are typically learned using extensions of classification algorithms to simple graphical structures (eg., linear chains) in which search and parameter estimation can be…
Multiobjective blackbox optimization deals with problems where the objective and constraint functions are the outputs of a numerical simulation. In this context, no derivatives are available, nor can they be approximated by finite…
Tackling simulation optimization problems with non-convex objective functions remains a fundamental challenge in operations research. In this paper, we propose a class of random search algorithms, called Regular Tree Search, which…
Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…
The Algorithm Selection Problem is concerned with selecting the best algorithm to solve a given problem on a case-by-case basis. It has become especially relevant in the last decade, as researchers are increasingly investigating how to…
We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function in $\R^n$ in a setting where only function evaluations are possible. While importance sampling is one of the most popular techniques used by machine…
With the recent explosion in the size and complexity of source codebases and software projects, the need for efficient source code search engines has increased dramatically. Unfortunately, existing information retrieval-based methods fail…
It is becoming increasingly apparent that probabilistic approaches can overcome conservatism and computational complexity of the classical worst-case deterministic framework and may lead to designs that are actually safer. In this paper we…