Related papers: DesignX: Human-Competitive Algorithm Designer for …
How can robots learn and adapt to new tasks and situations with little data? Systematic exploration and simulation are crucial tools for efficient robot learning. We present a novel black-box policy search algorithm focused on…
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
Nowadays, image-to-image translation methods, are the state of the art for the enhancement of natural images. Even if they usually show high performance in terms of accuracy, they often suffer from several limitations such as the generation…
Differential evolution (DE) algorithm is recognized as one of the most effective evolutionary algorithms, demonstrating remarkable efficacy in black-box optimization due to its derivative-free nature. Numerous enhancements to the…
When the human-robot interactions become ubiquitous, the environment surrounding these interactions will have significant impact on the safety and comfort of the human and the effectiveness and efficiency of the robot. Although most robots…
We introduce a novel distributed derivative-free optimization framework that is resilient to stragglers. The proposed method employs coded search directions at which the objective function is evaluated, and a decoding step to find the next…
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…
Divide and Conquer (DC) is conceptually well suited to high-dimensional optimization by decomposing a problem into multiple small-scale sub-problems. However, appealing performance can be seldom observed when the sub-problems are…
We present a functional framework for automated mechanism design based on a two-stage game model of strategic interaction between the designer and the mechanism participants, and apply it to several classes of two-player infinite games of…
Object detectors are widely used in safety-critical real-time applications such as autonomous driving. Explainability is especially important for safety-critical applications, and due to the variety of object detectors and their often…
Design and optimal control problems are among the fundamental, ubiquitous tasks we face in science and engineering. In both cases, we aim to represent and optimize an unknown (black-box) function that associates a performance/outcome to a…
We typically construct optimal designs based on a single objective function. To better capture the breadth of an experiment's goals, we could instead construct a multiple objective optimal design based on multiple objective functions. While…
Multi-objective optimization is a crucial matter in computer systems design space exploration because real-world applications often rely on a trade-off between several objectives. Derivatives are usually not available or impractical to…
We consider the problem of offline black-box optimization, where the goal is to discover optimal designs (e.g., molecules or materials) from past experimental data. A key challenge in this setting is data scarcity: in many scientific…
We study offline model-based optimization to maximize a black-box objective function with a static dataset of designs and scores. These designs encompass a variety of domains, including materials, robots and DNA sequences. A common approach…
Offline design optimization problem arises in numerous science and engineering applications including material and chemical design, where expensive online experimentation necessitates the use of in silico surrogate functions to predict and…
Automated design of metaheuristic algorithms offers an attractive avenue to reduce human effort and gain enhanced performance beyond human intuition. Current automated methods design algorithms within a fixed structure and operate from…
We present a centralized algorithmic framework for solving multi-robot path planning problems in general, two-dimensional, continuous environments while minimizing globally the task completion time. The framework obtains high levels of…
Automatic performance tuning (auto-tuning) is essential for optimizing high-performance applications, where vast and irregular search spaces make manual exploration infeasible. While auto-tuners traditionally rely on classical approaches…
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,…