Related papers: SETBVE: Quality-Diversity Driven Exploration of So…
For software to be reliable and resilient, it is widely accepted that tests must be created and maintained alongside the software itself. One safeguard from vulnerabilities and failures in code is to ensure correct behavior on the…
The input domain of software systems can typically be divided into sub-domains for which the outputs are similar. To ensure high quality it is critical to test the software on the boundaries between these sub-domains. Consequently, boundary…
A natural and often used strategy when testing software is to use input values at boundaries, i.e. where behavior is expected to change the most, an approach often called boundary value testing or analysis (BVA). Even though this has been a…
Quality-Diversity has emerged as a powerful family of evolutionary algorithms that generate diverse populations of high-performing solutions by implementing local competition principles inspired by biological evolution. While these…
Quality-Diversity algorithms provide efficient mechanisms to generate large collections of diverse and high-performing solutions, which have shown to be instrumental for solving downstream tasks. However, most of those algorithms rely on a…
Black-box discrete optimization (BB-DO) problems arise in many real-world applications, such as neural architecture search and mathematical model estimation. A key challenge in BB-DO is epistasis among parameters where multiple variables…
Mixture variational distributions in black box variational inference (BBVI) have demonstrated impressive results in challenging density estimation tasks. However, currently scaling the number of mixture components can lead to a linear…
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) today rests on fixed benchmarks that apply the same set of items to any model, producing ceiling and floor effects that mask capability gaps. We argue that the most informative evaluation signal lies…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms evolve behaviourally diverse and high-performing solutions. To illuminate the elite solutions for a space of behaviours, QD algorithms require the definition of a suitable behaviour space. If the behaviour…
Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) streamlines the automation of optimization algorithm design through meta-learning. It typically employs a bi-level structure: the meta-level policy undergoes meta-training to reduce the manual effort…
Enterprise-grade Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) systems support high-stakes workflows across finance, insurance, and healthcare. Early-phase system validation under limited budgets mandates uncovering diverse failure mechanisms,…
Quality-Diversity optimization is a new family of optimization algorithms that, instead of searching for a single optimal solution to solving a task, searches for a large collection of solutions that all solve the task in a different way.…
Boundary based blackbox attack has been recognized as practical and effective, given that an attacker only needs to access the final model prediction. However, the query efficiency of it is in general high especially for high dimensional…
Benchmarking in continuous black-box optimisation is hindered by the limited structural diversity of existing test suites such as BBOB. We explore whether large language models embedded in an evolutionary loop can be used to design…
Bayesian optimization is a powerful method for automating tuning of compilers. The complex landscape of autotuning provides a myriad of rarely considered structural challenges for black-box optimizers, and the lack of standardized…
Automating quantitative trading strategy development in dynamic markets is challenging, especially with increasing demand for personalized investment solutions. Existing methods often fail to explore the vast strategy space while preserving…
Automatic differentiation variational inference (ADVI) offers fast and easy-to-use posterior approximation in multiple modern probabilistic programming languages. However, its stochastic optimizer lacks clear convergence criteria and…
In this survey, we introduce Meta-Black-Box-Optimization~(MetaBBO) as an emerging avenue within the Evolutionary Computation~(EC) community, which incorporates Meta-learning approaches to assist automated algorithm design. Despite the…
Diversity has been proposed as a key criterion to improve testing effectiveness and efficiency.It can be used to optimise large test repositories but also to visualise test maintenance issues and raise practitioners' awareness about waste…
A fascinating aspect of nature lies in its ability to produce a collection of organisms that are all high-performing in their niche. Quality-Diversity (QD) methods are evolutionary algorithms inspired by this observation, that obtained…