Related papers: On Complexity of Model-Based Derivative-Free Metho…

The Inexact Restoration approach has proved to be an adequate tool for handling the problem of minimizing an expensive function within an arbitrary feasible set by using different degrees of precision in the objective function. The Inexact…

Submodular functions have applications throughout machine learning, but in many settings, we do not have direct access to the underlying function $f$. We focus on stochastic functions that are given as an expectation of functions over a…

Error bounds and complexity bounds in numerical analysis and information-based complexity are often proved for functions that are defined on very simple domains, such as a cube, a torus, or a sphere. We study optimal error bounds for the…

The superiorization methodology is intended to work with input data of constrained minimization problems, that is, a target function and a set of constraints. However, it is based on an antipodal way of thinking to what leads to constrained…

Likelihood-free Bayesian inference algorithms are popular methods for calibrating the parameters of complex, stochastic models, required when the likelihood of the observed data is intractable. These algorithms characteristically rely…

We present a stochastic trust-region model-based framework in which its radius is related to the probabilistic models. Especially, we propose a specific algorithm, termed STRME, in which the trust-region radius depends linearly on the…

Decision-Focused Learning (DFL) is a paradigm for tailoring a predictive model to a downstream optimization task that uses its predictions in order to perform better on that specific task. The main technical challenge associated with DFL is…

We consider the problem of multi-fidelity zeroth-order optimization, where one can evaluate a function $f$ at various approximation levels (of varying costs), and the goal is to optimize $f$ with the cheapest evaluations possible. In this…

We prove that the finite-difference based derivative-free descent (FD-DFD) methods have a capability to find the global minima for a class of multiple minima problems. Our main result shows that, for a class of multiple minima objectives…

We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function for which derivatives are unavailable, and a convex, nonsmooth function with easy-to-evaluate proximal operator. Of particular focus is the case where the smooth…

Trust region methods are a popular tool in reinforcement learning as they yield robust policy updates in continuous and discrete action spaces. However, enforcing such trust regions in deep reinforcement learning is difficult. Hence, many…

Model-based reinforcement learning approaches carry the promise of being data efficient. However, due to challenges in learning dynamics models that sufficiently match the real-world dynamics, they struggle to achieve the same asymptotic…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is increasingly employed in critical applications such as materials design and drug discovery. An increasingly popular strategy in BO is to forgo the sole reliance on high-fidelity data and instead use an ensemble…

This paper demonstrates the optimality of an interpolation set employed in derivative-free trust-region methods. This set is optimal in the sense that it minimizes the constant of well-poisedness in a ball centred at the starting point. It…

Robust optimization (RO) has emerged as one of the leading paradigms to efficiently model parameter uncertainty. The recent connections between RO and problems in statistics and machine learning domains demand for solving RO problems in…

Bayesian Optimisation (BO) refers to a suite of techniques for global optimisation of expensive black box functions, which use introspective Bayesian models of the function to efficiently search for the optimum. While BO has been applied…

Multifidelity Monte Carlo methods often rely on a preprocessing phase consisting of standard Monte Carlo sampling to estimate correlation coefficients between models of different fidelity to determine the weights and number of samples for…

We consider the problem of distributionally robust multimodal machine learning. Existing approaches often rely on merging modalities on the feature level (early fusion) or heuristic uncertainty modeling, which downplays modality-aware…

A method is proposed for solving equality constrained nonlinear optimization problems involving twice continuously differentiable functions. The method employs a trust funnel approach consisting of two phases: a first phase to locate an…

Time series forecasting drives operational decisions in areas like finance, transportation, and energy. While supervised learning approaches achieve strong performance, they require domain-specific training, feature engineering, and ongoing…