Related papers: From Consensus-Based Optimization to Evolution Str…
Agentic AI systems capable of autonomous planning and extended environmental interaction pose a fundamental control problem: how can humans maintain meaningful oversight of systems that may exceed their own capabilities? Existing approaches…
Bayesian optimization (BO) has become popular for sequential optimization of black-box functions. When BO is used to optimize a target function, we often have access to previous evaluations of potentially related functions. This begs the…
This paper is on Bayesian inference for parametric statistical models that are defined by a stochastic simulator which specifies how data is generated. Exact sampling is then possible but evaluating the likelihood function is typically…
Multi-Source Bayesian Optimization (MSBO) serves as a variant of the traditional Bayesian Optimization (BO) framework applicable to situations involving optimization of an objective black-box function over multiple information sources such…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…
Robust optimization (RO) is a common approach to tractably obtain safeguarding solutions for optimization problems with uncertain constraints. In this paper, we study a statistical framework to integrate data into RO, based on learning a…
In this work we introduce a new class of gradient-free global optimization methods based on a binary interaction dynamics governed by a Boltzmann type equation. In each interaction the particles act taking into account both the best…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is increasingly employed in critical applications to find the optimal design with minimal cost. While BO is known for its sample efficiency, relying solely on costly high-fidelity data can still result in high…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a widely-used method for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. Traditional BO assumes that the learner has full control over all query variables without additional constraints. However, in many…
In this paper, we develop an analytical framework for the partial differential equation underlying the consensus-based optimization model. The main challenge arises from the nonlinear, nonlocal nature of the consensus point, coupled with a…
We study the problem of convergence to a stationary point in zero-sum games. We propose competitive gradient optimization (CGO ), a gradient-based method that incorporates the interactions between the two players in zero-sum games for…
Bayesian optimization has been successfully applied to optimize black-box functions where the number of evaluations is severely limited. However, in many real-world applications, it is hard or impossible to know in advance which designs are…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular technique for sequential black-box function optimization, with applications including parameter tuning, robotics, environmental monitoring, and more. One of the most important challenges in BO is the…
First Order Bayesian Optimization (FOBO) is a sample efficient sequential approach to find the global maxima of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box objective function by suitably querying for the function and its gradient evaluations. Such…
We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is widely used for optimising black-box functions but requires us to specify the length scale hyperparameter, which defines the smoothness of the functions the optimizer will consider. Most current BO algorithms…
Bayesian optimization (BO) has been widely used to optimize expensive and black-box functions across various domains. However, existing BO methods have not addressed tensor-output functions. To fill this gap, we propose a novel…
Inverse Optimal Control (IOC) seeks to recover an unknown cost from expert demonstrations, and it provides a systematic way of modeling experts' decision mechanisms while considering the prior information of the cost functions.…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) approximates the trust region update using multiple epochs of clipped SGD. Each epoch may drift further from the natural gradient direction, creating path-dependent noise. To understand this drift, we can…
In this paper, we formally analyze global convergence in the realm of distributed consensus optimization. Current solutions have explored such analysis, particularly focusing on consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (CADMM),…