arXiv Machine Learning

Geometric Probing for Algorithm Selection in Continuous Black-Box Optimization

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

A Survey of Features Used for Representing Black-box Single-objective Continuous Optimization

arXiv:2406. 06629v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This survey examines key advancements in designing features to represent optimization problem instances, algorithm instances, and their interactions within the context of single-objective continuous black-box optimization.

By Gjorgjina Cenikj, Ana Nikolikj, Ga\v{s}per Petelin, Niki van Stein, Carola Doerr, Tome Eftimov
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

In-Context Batch Black-box Optimization via Flow Matching

In-Context Batch Black-box Optimization via Flow Matching introduces FMTR, an amortized method that learns a continuous, history-conditioned proposal distribution for variable-size batch sampling in expensive black-box optimization settings. FMTR is trained offline using conditional flow matching on Thompson-sampling argmaxes refined through a horizon-dependent Langevin pushforward map, enabling adaptive exploration-exploitation over the optimization horizon. At test time, FMTR generates batches without task-specific surrogate refitting or numerical acquisition optimization, achieving strong performance on synthetic and real-world benchmarks while significantly reducing batch selection computational cost.

By Quoc-Anh Hoang Nguyen, Xinyu Zhang, Daolang Huang, Julien Martinelli, Samuel Kaski
arXiv AI
Jul 28

DecoupleMix: Decoupled Ratio Search and Convex Allocation for Scalable VLM Data Recipes

arXiv:2607. 24516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While data curation for Vision Language Models (VLMs) is increasingly active, public practice for constructing pretraining mixtures remains largely heuristic: practitioners stack datasets that pass quality filters, set cross-domain ratios by intuition, and lack a principled, attributable criterion for admitting new data, while frontier recipes remain undisclosed.

By Jiahao Xie, Zhongbin Guo, Qianle Wang, Ruiqi Lu, Dongling Xiao, Wanxuan Sun, Cheng Yang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

SCOPE: Synthetic Conditional Objectives for Policy Evolution in Black-Box Combinatorial Optimization

Black-box combinatorial optimization requires systematically identifying high-quality solutions under a limited evaluation budget, yet the unknown objective function provides little guidance for deciding where the search should explore next. We introduce SCOPE, a general framework for Synthetic Conditional Objectives for Policy Evolution in Black-Box Combinatorial Optimization.

arXiv AI
Oct 28

BoLT: A Benchmark to Democratize Black-box Optimization Research for Expensive LLM Tasks

BoLT is a new benchmark designed to make black-box optimization research for large language model (LLM) tasks more accessible. It presents a suite of realistic LLM optimization problems—covering multi‑fidelity, multi‑objective, heteroscedastic noise, and high‑dimensional search spaces—grounded in thousands of real experiments and represented by lightweight surrogate models. The authors evaluate a wide range of Bayesian and other black‑box optimization methods on BoLT, finding that some BO techniques consistently outperform others and revealing gaps in current methods for LLM optimization.

By Ruth Wan Theng Chew, Zhiliang Chen, Apivich Hemachandra, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low