Related papers: The Bias-Variance Tradeoff in Data-Driven Optimiza…

Data augmentation aims to enrich training samples for alleviating the overfitting issue in low-resource or class-imbalanced situations. Traditional methods first devise task-specific operations such as Synonym Substitute, then preset the…

Biases with respect to socially-salient attributes of individuals have been well documented in evaluation processes used in settings such as admissions and hiring. We view such an evaluation process as a transformation of a distribution of…

We derive new and improved non-asymptotic deviation inequalities for the sample average approximation (SAA) of an optimization problem. Our results give strong error probability bounds that are "sub-Gaussian"~even when the randomness of the…

Sample-average approximations (SAA) are a practical means of finding approximate solutions of stochastic programming problems involving an extremely large (or infinite) number of scenarios. SAA can also be used to find estimates of a lower…

Assume that one is interested in estimating an average treatment effect (ATE), equal to a weighted average of $S$ conditional average treatment effects (CATEs). One has unbiased estimators of the CATEs. One could just average the CATE…

Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are general metaheuristics used in optimization that represent a more recent alternative to classical approaches like evolutionary algorithms. In a nutshell, EDAs typically do not directly evolve…

Computational models in fields such as computational neuroscience are often evaluated via stochastic simulation or numerical approximation. Fitting these models implies a difficult optimization problem over complex, possibly noisy parameter…

This article addresses the problem of derivative-free (single- or multi-objective) optimization subject to multiple inequality constraints. Both the objective and constraint functions are assumed to be smooth, non-linear and expensive to…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a class of sample-efficient global optimization methods, where a probabilistic model conditioned on previous observations is used to determine future evaluations via the optimization of an acquisition function.…

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a method for globally optimizing black-box functions. While BO has been successfully applied to many scenarios, developing effective BO algorithms that scale to functions with high-dimensional domains is still…

We develop and apply a novel shape optimization exemplified for a two-blade rotor with respect to the figure of merit ($FM$). This topologically assisted optimization (TAO) contains two steps. First a global evolutionary optimization is…

Several fundamental problems in science and engineering consist of global optimization tasks involving unknown high-dimensional (black-box) functions that map a set of controllable variables to the outcomes of an expensive experiment.…

We examine a stochastic formulation for data-driven optimization wherein the decision-maker is not privy to the true distribution, but has knowledge that it lies in some hypothesis set and possesses a historical data set, from which…

Traditional data influence estimation methods, like influence function, assume that learning algorithms are permutation-invariant with respect to training data. However, modern training paradigms, especially for foundation models using…

Selective Prediction is the task of rejecting inputs a model would predict incorrectly on. This involves a trade-off between input space coverage (how many data points are accepted) and model utility (how good is the performance on accepted…

We claim that a source of severe failures for Variational Auto-Encoders is the choice of the distribution class used for the observation model.A first theoretical and experimental contribution of the paper is to establish that even in the…

``Localization'' has proven to be a valuable tool in the Statistical Learning literature as it allows sharp risk bounds in terms of the problem geometry. Localized bounds seem to be much less exploited in the Stochastic Optimization…

In this paper, we develop a stochastic set-valued optimization (SVO) framework tailored for robust machine learning. In the SVO setting, each decision variable is mapped to a set of objective values, and optimality is defined via set…

We discuss Bayesian model uncertainty analysis and forecasting in sequential dynamic modeling of multivariate time series. The perspective is that of a decision-maker with a specific forecasting objective that guides thinking about relevant…

Existing Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) methods focus on how to search when controlling optimizers, but largely overlook where to search. We propose MetaSG-SAEA, a bi-level MetaBBO framework for expensive constrained multi-objective…