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Related papers: Task-free Adaptive Meta Black-box Optimization

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This paper presents the results and insights from the black-box optimization (BBO) challenge at NeurIPS 2020 which ran from July-October, 2020. The challenge emphasized the importance of evaluating derivative-free optimizers for tuning the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-01 Ryan Turner , David Eriksson , Michael McCourt , Juha Kiili , Eero Laaksonen , Zhen Xu , Isabelle Guyon

Many problems in science and engineering involve optimizing an expensive black-box function over a high-dimensional space. For such black-box optimization (BBO) problems, we typically assume a small budget for online function evaluations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Siddarth Krishnamoorthy , Satvik Mehul Mashkaria , Aditya Grover

Black-box optimization (BBO) has a broad range of applications, including automatic machine learning, engineering, physics, and experimental design. However, it remains a challenge for users to apply BBO methods to their problems at hand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Yang Li , Yu Shen , Wentao Zhang , Yuanwei Chen , Huaijun Jiang , Mingchao Liu , Jiawei Jiang , Jinyang Gao , Wentao Wu , Zhi Yang , Ce Zhang , Bin Cui

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Minfang Lu , Shuai Ning , Shuangrong Liu , Fengyang Sun , Bo Zhang , Bo Yang , Lin Wang

A wide spectrum of design and decision problems, including parameter tuning, A/B testing and drug design, intrinsically are instances of black-box optimization. Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful tool that models and optimizes such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Tianyi Bai , Yang Li , Yu Shen , Xinyi Zhang , Wentao Zhang , Bin Cui

We consider the problem of offline black-box optimization, where the goal is to discover optimal designs (e.g., molecules or materials) from past experimental data. A key challenge in this setting is data scarcity: in many scientific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Azza Fadhel , The Hung Tran , Trong Nghia Hoang , Jana Doppa

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a successful methodology to optimize black-box functions that are expensive to evaluate. While traditional methods optimize each black-box function in isolation, there has been recent interest in speeding up BO…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-30 Valerio Perrone , Huibin Shen , Matthias Seeger , Cedric Archambeau , Rodolphe Jenatton

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art model-based adaptive sampling approaches for single-objective black-box optimization (BBO). While BBO literature includes various promising sampling techniques, there is still a lack of comprehensive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-25 Nazanin Nezami , Hadis Anahideh

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a well-established method for addressing black-box optimization problems. In many real-world scenarios, optimization often involves multiple functions, emphasizing the importance of leveraging data and learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Khoa Nguyen , Viet Huynh , Binh Tran , Tri Pham , Tin Huynh , Thin Nguyen

Data-driven black-box model-based optimization (MBO) problems arise in a great number of practical application scenarios, where the goal is to find a design over the whole space maximizing a black-box target function based on a static…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Mingcheng Chen , Haoran Zhao , Yuxiang Zhao , Hulei Fan , Hongqiao Gao , Yong Yu , Zheng Tian

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful black-box optimization framework that looks to efficiently learn the global optimum of an unknown system by systematically trading-off between exploration and exploitation. However, the use of BO as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-28 Dinesh Krishnamoorthy , Joel A. Paulson

Balancing competing objectives is omnipresent across disciplines, from drug design to autonomous systems. Multi-objective Bayesian optimization is a promising solution for such expensive, black-box problems: it fits probabilistic surrogates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xinyu Zhang , Conor Hassan , Julien Martinelli , Daolang Huang , Samuel Kaski

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…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zipeng Sun , Can Chen , Ye Yuan , Haolun Wu , Jiayao Gu , Christopher Pal , Xue Liu

For a wide range of applications the structure of systems like Neural Networks or complex simulations, is unknown and approximation is costly or even impossible. Black-box optimization seeks to find optimal (hyper-) parameters for these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Janina Schreiber , Damar Wicaksono , Michael Hecht

Black-box optimization often relies on evolutionary and swarm algorithms whose performance is highly problem dependent. We view an optimizer as a short program over a small vocabulary of search operators and learn this operator program…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Junbo Jacob Lian , Mingyang Yu , Kaichen Ouyang , Shengwei Fu , Rui Zhong , Yujun Zhang , Jun Zhang , Huiling Chen

The pursuit of universal black-box optimization (BBO) algorithms is a longstanding goal. However, unlike domains such as language or vision, where scaling structured data has driven generalization, progress in offline BBO remains hindered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Rong-Xi Tan , Ming Chen , Ke Xue , Yao Wang , Yaoyuan Wang , Sheng Fu , Chao Qian

Benchmark Design in Black-Box Optimization (BBO) is a fundamental yet open-ended topic. Early BBO benchmarks are predominantly human-crafted, introducing expert bias and constraining diversity. Automating this design process can relieve the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Chen Wang , Sijie Ma , Zeyuan Ma , Yue-Jiao Gong

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is an efficient tool for optimizing black-box functions, but its theoretical guarantees typically hold in the asymptotic regime. In many critical real-world applications such as drug discovery or materials design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Diantong Li , Kyunghyun Cho , Chong Liu

Black-box optimization (BBO) has become increasingly relevant for tackling complex decision-making problems, especially in public policy domains such as police redistricting. However, its broader application in public policymaking is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-23 Wenqian Xing , JungHo Lee , Chong Liu , Shixiang Zhu

Data-efficient learning algorithms are essential in many practical applications for which data collection is expensive, e.g., for the optimal deployment of wireless systems in unknown propagation scenarios. Meta-learning can address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Ivana Nikoloska , Osvaldo Simeone