Related papers: BBOPlace-Bench: Benchmarking Black-Box Optimizatio…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sequential approach for optimizing black-box objective functions using zeroth-order noisy observations. In BO, Gaussian processes (GPs) are employed as probabilistic surrogate models to estimate the objective…
Black box discrete optimization (BBDO) appears in wide range of engineering tasks. Evolutionary or other BBDO approaches have been applied, aiming at automating necessary tuning of system parameters, such as hyper parameter tuning of…
It is commonly believed that Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithms are highly efficient for optimizing numerically costly functions. However, BO is not often compared to widely different alternatives, and is mostly tested on narrow sets of…
Optimization of LLM training and inference configurations, such as hyperparameters, data mixtures, and prompts, is critical to performance, but it is often approached heuristically in practice, leading to potentially suboptimal outcomes. By…
Bayesian optimisation (BO) uses probabilistic surrogate models - usually Gaussian processes (GPs) - for the optimisation of expensive black-box functions. At each BO iteration, the GP hyperparameters are fit to previously-evaluated data by…
The need to collect data via expensive measurements of black-box functions is prevalent across science, engineering and medicine. As an example, hyperparameter tuning of a large AI model is critical to its predictive performance but is…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) has become a core method for solving expensive black-box optimization problems. While much research focussed on the choice of the acquisition function, we focus on online length-scale adaption and the choice of…
Differential evolution (DE) generally requires parameter control methods (PCMs) for the scale factor and crossover rate. Although a better understanding of PCMs provides a useful clue to designing an efficient DE, their effectiveness is…
While Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a very popular method for optimizing expensive black-box functions, it fails to leverage the experience of domain experts. This causes BO to waste function evaluations on bad design choices (e.g., machine…
Real-world problems often involve the optimization of several objectives under multiple constraints. An example is the hyper-parameter tuning problem of machine learning algorithms. In particular, the minimization of the estimation of the…
The global optimization of a high-dimensional black-box function under black-box constraints is a pervasive task in machine learning, control, and engineering. These problems are challenging since the feasible set is typically non-convex…
We study offline black-box optimization (BBO), aiming to discover improved designs from an offline dataset of designs and labels, a problem common in robotics, DNA, and materials science with limited labeled samples. While recent work…
This study targets the mixed-integer black-box optimization (MI-BBO) problem where continuous and integer variables should be optimized simultaneously. The CMA-ES, our focus in this study, is a population-based stochastic search method that…
Most existing black-box optimization methods assume that all variables in the system being optimized have equal cost and can change freely at each iteration. However, in many real world systems, inputs are passed through a sequence of…
Theoretical and empirical research on evolutionary computation methods complement each other by providing two fundamentally different approaches towards a better understanding of black-box optimization heuristics. In discrete optimization,…
Black-box optimization (BBO) algorithms are concerned with finding the best solutions for problems with missing analytical details. Most classical methods for such problems are based on strong and fixed a priori assumptions, such as…
Autonomous Experimentation Platforms (AEPs) are advanced manufacturing platforms that, under intelligent control, can sequentially search the material design space (MDS) and identify parameters with the desired properties. At the heart of…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a common approach for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) in automated machine learning. Although it is well-accepted that HPO is crucial to obtain well-performing machine learning models, tuning BO's own…
In this work we rigorously analyse assumptions inherent to black-box optimisation hyper-parameter tuning tasks. Our results on the Bayesmark benchmark indicate that heteroscedasticity and non-stationarity pose significant challenges for…
When it comes to expensive black-box optimization problems, Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a well-known and powerful solution. Many real-world applications involve a large number of dimensions, hence scaling BO to high dimension is of much…