Related papers: Using the Empirical Attainment Function for Analyz…
With much longer optimization time than that of untargeted attacks notwithstanding, the transferability of targeted attacks is still far from satisfactory. Recent studies reveal that fine-tuning an existing adversarial example (AE) in…
Bayesian optimization provides an effective method to optimize expensive-to-evaluate black box functions. It has been widely applied to problems in many fields, including notably in computer science, e.g. in machine learning to optimize…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is an attractive machine learning framework for performing sample-efficient global optimization of black-box functions. The optimization process is guided by an acquisition function that selects points to acquire…
Several low-bandwidth distributable black-box optimization algorithms in the family of finite differences such as Evolution Strategies have recently been shown to perform nearly as well as tailored Reinforcement Learning methods in some…
Traditional model-free feature selection methods treat each feature independently while disregarding the interrelationships among features, which leads to relatively poor performance compared with the model-aware methods. To address this…
Understanding how changes in explanatory features affect the unconditional distribution of the outcome is important in many applications. However, existing black-box predictive models are not readily suited for analyzing such questions. In…
The concept of gray-box optimization, in juxtaposition to black-box optimization, revolves about the idea of exploiting the problem structure to implement more efficient evolutionary algorithms (EAs). Work on factorized distribution…
Bayesian optimisation is a popular approach for optimising expensive black-box functions. The next location to be evaluated is selected via maximising an acquisition function that balances exploitation and exploration. Gaussian processes,…
Extending a recent suggestion to generate new instances for numerical black-box optimization benchmarking by interpolating pairs of the well-established BBOB functions from the COmparing COntinuous Optimizers (COCO) platform, we propose in…
We present a simple local search algorithm for computing EFX (envy-free up to any good) allocations of $m$ indivisible goods among $n$ agents with additive valuations. EFX is a compelling fairness notion, and whether such allocations always…
We develop a probabilistic framework for analysing model-based reinforcement learning in the episodic setting. We then apply it to study finite-time horizon stochastic control problems with linear dynamics but unknown coefficients and…
In this work, we present a numerical optimal control framework for reachable set computation using \emph{normotopes}, a new set representation as a norm ball with a shaping matrix. In reachable set computations, we expect to continuously…
Identifiability means that iterates generated by optimization algorithms are eventually confined to an identifiable set. This property is computationally useful because minimizing a nonsmooth function near a critical point reduces to…
For many tasks, the reward function is inaccessible to introspection or too complex to be specified procedurally, and must instead be learned from user data. Prior work has evaluated learned reward functions by evaluating policies optimized…
We consider a zeroth-order distributed optimization problem, where the global objective function is a black-box function and, as such, its gradient information is inaccessible to the local agents. Instead, the local agents can only use the…
Empirical divergence maximization (EDM) refers to a recently proposed strategy for estimating f-divergences and likelihood ratio functions. This paper extends the idea to empirical vector quantization where one seeks to empirically derive…
Some real-world problems revolve to solve the optimization problem \max_{x\in\mathcal{X}}f\left(x\right) where f\left(.\right) is a black-box function and X might be the set of non-vectorial objects (e.g., distributions) where we can only…
A reduced-bias nonparametric estimator of the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the survival function is proposed using infinite-order kernels. Fourier transform theory on generalized functions is utilized to obtain the improved…
We derive an optimal policy for adaptively restarting a randomized algorithm, based on observed features of the run-so-far, so as to minimize the expected time required for the algorithm to successfully terminate. Given a suitable Bayesian…
Industrial financial systems operate on temporal event sequences such as transactions, user actions, and system logs. While recent research emphasizes representation learning and large language models, production systems continue to rely…