Related papers: Introduction to Interpolation-Based Optimization
The goal of this paper is to investigate an approach for derivative-free optimization that has not received sufficient attention in the literature and is yet one of the simplest to implement and parallelize. It consists of computing…
Comparison-Based Optimization (CBO) is an optimization paradigm that assumes only very limited access to the objective function f(x). Despite the growing relevance of CBO to real-world applications, this field has received little attention…
Interest in derivative-free optimization (DFO) and "evolutionary strategies" (ES) has recently surged in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) community, with growing evidence that they can match state of the art methods for policy optimization…
Decomposition has become an increasingly popular technique for evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO). A decomposition-based EMO algorithm is usually designed to approximate a whole Pareto-optimal front (PF). However, in practice,…
In this paper, we propose the StepDIRECT algorithm for derivative-free optimization (DFO), in which the black-box objective function has a stepwise landscape. Our framework is based on the well-known DIRECT algorithm. By incorporating the…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a class of global optimization algorithms, suitable for minimizing an expensive objective function in as few function evaluations as possible. While BO budgets are typically given in iterations, this implicitly…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a popular method for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) due to its stability and simplicity. However, it is also known to be sensitive to noise in the data and prone to overfitting.…
We study the problem of optimizing a function under a \emph{budgeted number of evaluations}. We only assume that the function is \emph{locally} smooth around one of its global optima. The difficulty of optimization is measured in terms of…
Optical computing holds promise for high-speed, energy-efficient information processing, with diffractive optical networks emerging as a flexible platform for implementing task-specific transformations. A challenge, however, is the…
Gradient-based methods are well-suited for derivative-free optimization (DFO), where finite-difference (FD) estimates are commonly used as gradient surrogates. Traditional stochastic approximation methods, such as Kiefer-Wolfowitz (KW) and…
Recent alignment methods based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) reformulate preference learning as supervised optimization over pairwise comparisons, offering improved efficiency and stability over reinforcement learning from human…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular framework to optimize black-box functions. In many applications, the objective function can be evaluated at multiple fidelities to enable a trade-off between the cost and accuracy. To reduce the…
The goal of offline black-box optimization (BBO) is to optimize an expensive black-box function using a fixed dataset of function evaluations. Prior works consider forward approaches that learn surrogates to the black-box function and…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which aligns models with human preferences through win/lose data pairs, has achieved remarkable success in language and image generation. However, applying DPO to video diffusion models faces critical…
In imitation learning from observation IfO, a learning agent seeks to imitate a demonstrating agent using only observations of the demonstrated behavior without access to the control signals generated by the demonstrator. Recent methods…
We consider $\min\{f(x):g(x) \le 0, ~x\in X\},$ where $X$ is a compact convex subset of $\RR^m$, and $f$ and $g$ are continuous convex functions defined on an open neighbourhood of $X$. We work in the setting of derivative-free…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is broadly utilized for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values because of its flexibility. Despite its effectiveness, it has been observed that the capability of DPO to generate…
We propose the intermediate direct preference optimization (DPO) method to calculate the DPO loss at selected intermediate layers as an auxiliary loss for finetuning large language models (LLMs). The conventional DPO method fine-tunes a…
We introduce Parametric Density Path Optimization (PDPO), a novel method for computing action-minimizing paths between probability densities. The core idea is to represent the target probability path as the pushforward of a reference…
We propose Discrete Consensus-Based Optimization (DCBO), a fully discrete version of the Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO) framework. DCBO is a multi-agent method for the global optimization of possibly non-convex and non-differentiable…