Related papers: CMA-ES with Adaptive Reevaluation for Multiplicati…
Existing audio-to-MIDI tools extract notes but discard the timbral characteristics that define an instrument's identity. We present Instrumental, a system that recovers continuous synthesizer parameters from audio by coupling a…
This paper introduces a multi-level (m-lev) mechanism into Evolution Strategies (ESs) in order to address a class of global optimization problems that could benefit from fine discretization of their decision variables. Such problems arise…
Reliable state estimation depends on accurately modeled noise covariances, which are difficult to determine in practice. This paper formulates the noise covariance estimation as a bilevel optimization problem that factorizes the joint…
This work introduces the StoMADS-PB algorithm for constrained stochastic blackbox optimization, which is an extension of the mesh adaptive direct-search (MADS) method originally developed for deterministic blackbox optimization under…
Training energy-based models (EBMs) with noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) is theoretically feasible but practically challenging. Effective learning requires the noise distribution to be approximately similar to the target distribution,…
Many global optimization algorithms of the memetic variety rely on some form of stochastic search, and yet they often lack a sound probabilistic basis. Without a recourse to the powerful tools of stochastic calculus, treading the fine…
We consider ECNoise, a practical tool for estimating the magnitude of noise in evaluations of a black-box function. Recent developments in numerical optimization algorithms have seen increased usage of ECNoise as a subroutine to provide a…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are a sort of nature-inspired metaheuristics, which have wide applications in various practical optimization problems. In these problems, objective evaluations are usually inaccurate, because noise is almost…
Echo State Networks represent a type of recurrent neural network with a large randomly generated reservoir and a small number of readout connections trained via linear regression. The most common topology of the reservoir is a fully…
Most successful stochastic black-box optimizers, such as CMA-ES, use rankings of the individual samples to obtain a new search distribution. Yet, the use of rankings also introduces several issues such as the underlying optimization…
The multi-reference alignment (MRA) problem entails estimating an image from multiple noisy and rotated copies of itself. If the noise level is low, one can reconstruct the image by estimating the missing rotations, aligning the images, and…
Recently it was shown by Nesterov (2011) that techniques form convex optimization can be used to successfully accelerate simple derivative-free randomized optimization methods. The appeal of those schemes lies in their low complexity, which…
The limited memory BFGS method (L-BFGS) of Liu and Nocedal (1989) is often considered to be the method of choice for continuous optimization when first- and/or second- order information is available. However, the use of L-BFGS can be…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient approach for tuning design parameters to optimize expensive-to-evaluate, black-box performance metrics. In many manufacturing processes, the design parameters are subject to random input…
This work introduces StoMADS, a stochastic variant of the mesh adaptive direct-search (MADS) algorithm originally developed for deterministic blackbox optimization. StoMADS considers the unconstrained optimization of an objective function f…
Acoustic echo degrades the user experience in voice communication systems thus needs to be suppressed completely. We propose a real-time residual acoustic echo suppression (RAES) method using an efficient convolutional neural network. The…
We consider learning to optimize a classification metric defined by a black-box function of the confusion matrix. Such black-box learning settings are ubiquitous, for example, when the learner only has query access to the metric of…
Cluster-randomized experiments are increasingly used to evaluate interventions in routine practice conditions, and researchers often adopt model-based methods with covariate adjustment in the statistical analyses. However, the validity of…
Automated Algorithm Selection (AAS) is a popular meta-algorithmic approach and has demonstrated to work well for single-objective optimisation in combination with exploratory landscape features (ELA), i.e., (numerical) descriptive features…
When recovering an unknown signal from noisy measurements, the computational difficulty of performing optimal Bayesian MMSE (minimum mean squared error) inference often necessitates the use of maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference, a special…