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Related papers: LiBOG: Lifelong Learning for Black-Box Optimizer G…

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Existing studies in black-box optimization for machine learning suffer from low generalizability, caused by a typically selective choice of problem instances used for training and testing different optimization algorithms. Among other…

Black-box optimization (BBO) has become increasingly relevant for tackling complex decision-making problems, especially in public policy domains such as police redistricting. However, its broader application in public policymaking is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-23 Wenqian Xing , JungHo Lee , Chong Liu , Shixiang Zhu

Continual or Lifelong Learning aims to develop models capable of acquiring new knowledge from a sequence of tasks without catastrophically forgetting what has been learned before. Existing approaches often rely on storing samples from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Shihao Ji , Zihui Song

Learned optimizers -- neural networks that are trained to act as optimizers -- have the potential to dramatically accelerate training of machine learning models. However, even when meta-trained across thousands of tasks at huge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-23 James Harrison , Luke Metz , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

Humans can continuously learn new knowledge. However, machine learning models suffer from drastic dropping in performance on previous tasks after learning new tasks. Cognitive science points out that the competition of similar knowledge is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Runqi Wang , Yuxiang Bao , Baochang Zhang , Jianzhuang Liu , Wentao Zhu , Guodong Guo

The use of black-box optimization for the design of new biological sequences is an emerging research area with potentially revolutionary impact. The cost and latency of wet-lab experiments requires methods that find good sequences in few…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Christof Angermueller , David Belanger , Andreea Gane , Zelda Mariet , David Dohan , Kevin Murphy , Lucy Colwell , D Sculley

Many challenges in science and engineering, such as drug discovery and communication network design, involve optimizing complex and expensive black-box functions across vast search spaces. Thus, it is essential to leverage existing data to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Juncheng Dong , Zihao Wu , Hamid Jafarkhani , Ali Pezeshki , Vahid Tarokh

Humans accumulate knowledge in a lifelong fashion. Modern deep neural networks, on the other hand, are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting: when adapted to perform new tasks, they often fail to preserve their performance on previously…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Mengyao Zhai , Lei Chen , Jiawei He , Megha Nawhal , Frederick Tung , Greg Mori

Optimization of high-dimensional black-box functions is an extremely challenging problem. While Bayesian optimization has emerged as a popular approach for optimizing black-box functions, its applicability has been limited to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-06 Zi Wang , Chengtao Li , Stefanie Jegelka , Pushmeet Kohli

In lifelong learning, data are used to improve performance not only on the present task, but also on past and future (unencountered) tasks. While typical transfer learning algorithms can improve performance on future tasks, their…

Black-box optimization (BBO) has a broad range of applications, including automatic machine learning, experimental design, and database knob tuning. However, users still face challenges when applying BBO methods to their problems at hand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Huaijun Jiang , Yu Shen , Yang Li , Beicheng Xu , Sixian Du , Wentao Zhang , Ce Zhang , Bin Cui

Black-box optimization (BBO) addresses problems where objectives are accessible only through costly queries without gradients or explicit structure. Classical derivative-free methods -- line search, direct search, and model-based solvers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Morteza Kimiaei , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev

Many problems in science and engineering involve optimizing an expensive black-box function over a high-dimensional space. For such black-box optimization (BBO) problems, we typically assume a small budget for online function evaluations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Siddarth Krishnamoorthy , Satvik Mehul Mashkaria , Aditya Grover

Existing Bayesian Optimization (BO) methods typically balance exploration and exploitation to optimize costly objective functions. However, these methods often suffer from a significant one-step bias, which may lead to convergence towards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Ruiyao Miao , Junren Xiao , Shiya Tsang , Hui Xiong , Yingnian Wu

Continual learning (CL) refers to the ability to continually learn over time by accommodating new knowledge while retaining previously learned experience. While this concept is inherent in human learning, current machine learning methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Anna Vettoruzzo , Joaquin Vanschoren , Mohamed-Rafik Bouguelia , Thorsteinn Rögnvaldsson

Learning to Optimize (L2O) enhances optimization efficiency with integrated neural networks. L2O paradigms achieve great outcomes, e.g., refitting optimizer, generating unseen solutions iteratively or directly. However, conventional L2O…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Mingjia Shi , Ruihan Lin , Xuxi Chen , Yuhao Zhou , Zezhen Ding , Pingzhi Li , Tong Wang , Kai Wang , Zhangyang Wang , Jiheng Zhang , Tianlong Chen

Benchmark Design in Black-Box Optimization (BBO) is a fundamental yet open-ended topic. Early BBO benchmarks are predominantly human-crafted, introducing expert bias and constraining diversity. Automating this design process can relieve the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Chen Wang , Sijie Ma , Zeyuan Ma , Yue-Jiao Gong

Black-box optimization in science and engineering often comes with side information: experts, simulators, pretrained predictors, or heuristics can suggest which candidates look promising. This information can accelerate search, but it can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Nicolas Samuel Blumer , Julien Martinelli , Samuel Kaski

The ability to accelerate the design of biological sequences can have a substantial impact on the progress of the medical field. The problem can be framed as a global optimization problem where the objective is an expensive black-box…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-15 Leo Feng , Padideh Nouri , Aneri Muni , Yoshua Bengio , Pierre-Luc Bacon

The no free lunch theorem states that no model is better suited to every problem. A question that arises from this is how to design methods that propose optimizers tailored to specific problems achieving state-of-the-art performance. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Hugo Siqueira Gomes , Benjamin Léger , Christian Gagné