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Collaborative learning is an important tool to train multiple clients more effectively by enabling communication among clients. Identifying helpful clients, however, presents challenging and often introduces significant overhead. In this…
Black-box optimization algorithms have been widely used in various machine learning problems, including reinforcement learning and prompt fine-tuning. However, directly optimizing the training loss value, as commonly done in existing…
Bundle recommendation aims to recommend a set of items to each user. However, the sparser interactions between users and bundles raise a big challenge, especially in cold-start scenarios. Traditional collaborative filtering methods do not…
As one of the most fundamental problems in machine learning, statistics and differential privacy, Differentially Private Stochastic Convex Optimization (DP-SCO) has been extensively studied in recent years. However, most of the previous…
This paper introduces two novel modifications to the Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm [1], approached from a mixed-policy perspective. Standard policy gradient methods can suffer from instability and sample…
Subspace optimization methods have the attractive property of reducing large-scale optimization problems to a sequence of low-dimensional subspace optimization problems. However, existing subspace optimization frameworks adopt a fixed…
A new technique of global optimization and its applications in particular to neural networks are presented. The algorithm is also compared to other global optimization algorithms such as Gradient descent (GD), Monte Carlo (MC), Genetic…
A novel distributed algorithm is proposed for finite-time converging to a feasible consensus solution satisfying global optimality to a certain accuracy of the distributed robust convex optimization problem (DRCO) subject to bounded…
We consider model-based derivative-free optimization (DFO) for large-scale problems, based on iterative minimization in random subspaces. We provide the first worst-case complexity bound for such methods for convergence to approximate…
A novel data-driven stochastic robust optimization (DDSRO) framework is proposed for optimization under uncertainty leveraging labeled multi-class uncertainty data. Uncertainty data in large datasets are often collected from various…
Learning to sample from complex unnormalized distributions over discrete domains emerged as a promising research direction with applications in statistical physics, variational inference, and combinatorial optimization. Recent work has…
Recent Meta-learning for Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) methods harness neural networks to meta-learn configurations of traditional black-box optimizers. Despite their success, they are inevitably restricted by the limitations of…
Dynamical generative models that produce samples through an iterative process, such as Flow Matching and denoising diffusion models, have seen widespread use, but there have not been many theoretically-sound methods for improving these…
The goal of Feature Selection - comprising filter, wrapper, and embedded approaches - is to find the optimal feature subset for designated downstream tasks. Nevertheless, current feature selection methods are limited by: 1) the selection…
The optimization of expensive to evaluate, black-box, mixed-variable functions, i.e. functions that have continuous and discrete inputs, is a difficult and yet pervasive problem in science and engineering. In Bayesian optimization (BO),…
A popular approach to protein design is to combine a generative model with a discriminative model for conditional sampling. The generative model samples plausible sequences while the discriminative model guides a search for sequences with…
Modern generative AI models, such as diffusion and flow matching models, can sample from rich data distributions. However, many applications, especially in science and engineering, require more than drawing samples from the model…
PDE-Constrained Optimization (PDECO) problems can be accelerated significantly by employing gradient-based methods with surrogate models like neural operators compared to traditional numerical solvers. However, this approach faces two key…
The core challenge of high-dimensional and expensive black-box optimization (BBO) is how to obtain better performance faster with little function evaluation cost. The essence of the problem is how to design an efficient optimization…
Black-box global optimization aims at minimizing an objective function whose analytical form is not known. To do so, many state-of-the-art methods rely on sampling-based strategies, where sampling distributions are built in an iterative…