Related papers: Paths Beyond Local Search: A Nearly Tight Bound fo…
Designing a fast and efficient optimization method with local optima avoidance capability on a variety of optimization problems is still an open problem for many researchers. In this work, the concept of a new global optimization method…
Optimization seeks extremal points in a function. When there are superextensively many optima, optimization algorithms are liable to get stuck. Under these conditions, generic algorithms tend to find marginal optima, which have many nearly…
Constrained Optimum Path (COP) problems appear in many real-life applications, especially on communication networks. Some of these problems have been considered and solved by specific techniques which are usually difficult to extend. In…
In a recent work, Esmer et al. describe a simple method - Approximate Monotone Local Search - to obtain exponential approximation algorithms from existing parameterized exact algorithms, polynomial-time approximation algorithms and, more…
A local search algorithm solving an NP-complete optimisation problem can be viewed as a stochastic process moving in an 'energy landscape' towards eventually finding an optimal solution. For the random 3-satisfiability problem, the…
A number of prototypical optimization problems in multi-agent systems (e.g., task allocation and network load-sharing) exhibit a highly local structure: that is, each agent's decision variables are only directly coupled to few other agent's…
The main challenge of nonconvex optimization is to find a global optimum, or at least to avoid ``bad'' local minima and meaningless stationary points. We study here the extent to which algorithms, as opposed to optimization models and…
One of the actual problems in the field of numerical optimisation, as is well known, is the problem of the search for the global extremum of a multivariate function [1-9,13,14,17-21]. Various versions of the random search methods [6,8,9]…
A key property underlying the success of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) is their global search behavior, which allows the algorithms to `jump' from a current state to other parts of the search space, thereby avoiding to get stuck in local…
Automatically tuning software configuration for optimizing a single performance attribute (e.g., minimizing latency) is not trivial, due to the nature of the configuration systems (e.g., complex landscape and expensive measurement). To deal…
A central theme in distributed network algorithms concerns understanding and coping with the issue of locality. Inspired by sequential complexity theory, we focus on a complexity theory for distributed decision problems. In the context of…
This paper is concerned with numerically finding a global solution of constrained optimal control problems with many local minima. The focus is on the optimal decentralized control (ODC) problem, whose feasible set is recently shown to have…
Randomized rounding is a technique that was originally used to approximate hard offline discrete optimization problems from a mathematical programming relaxation. Since then it has also been used to approximately solve sequential stochastic…
In this paper, we study the complexity of computing locally optimal solutions for weighted versions of standard set problems such as SetCover, SetPacking, and many more. For our investigation, we use the framework of PLS, as defined in…
We study the theoretical convergence properties of random-search methods when optimizing non-convex objective functions without having access to derivatives. We prove that standard random-search methods that do not rely on second-order…
Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in…
In network analysis and graph mining, closeness centrality is a popular measure to infer the importance of a vertex. Computing closeness efficiently for individual vertices received considerable attention. The NP-hard problem of group…
Estimating equations arise in a wide range of statistical applications, including longitudinal and clustered data analysis, survival analysis, econometrics, and semiparametric inference. In high-dimensional settings, adding…
We study the question of whether parallelization in the exploration of the feasible set can be used to speed up convex optimization, in the local oracle model of computation. We show that the answer is negative for both deterministic and…
Finding global optima in high-dimensional optimization problems is extremely challenging since the number of function evaluations required to sufficiently explore the search space increases exponentially with its dimensionality.…