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:2605. 04954v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Per-instance algorithm selection (PIAS) takes advantage of complementarity between a set of algorithms by deciding which algorithm to run on a given instance.
By Koen van der Blom, Diederick Vermetten
arXiv:2602. 03901v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The pursuit of optimal trade-offs in high-dimensional search spaces under stringent computational constraints poses a fundamental challenge for contemporary multi-objective optimization.
By Rong Fu, Chunlei Meng, Haoyu Zhao, Kun Liu, JiaBao Dou, Youjin Wang, Simon James Fong
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: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
arXiv:2606. 00862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have been widely used for expensive black-box optimization problems.
By Xiao Jin, Yongxiong Wang, Haobo Liu, Yudong Du, Yukun Du
arXiv:2607. 00691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Black-box optimization is a fundamental science and engineering tool that makes it possible to optimize objectives without gradient information.
By Edouard R. Dufour, Pascal Fua
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.
Batch black-box optimization is important for expensive systems where many candidates can be evaluated in parallel, yet only a few rounds of evaluation are affordable. In this regime, effective batch...
arXiv:2607. 19031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated algorithm selection in black-box optimization typically relies on supervised models that map landscape features to algorithm performance labels.
By Yihang Lu, Tome Eftimov, Carola Doerr
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
arXiv:2602.00532v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Constraint handling is central to constrained black-box optimization (BBO), where objective improvement and feasibility restoration often pro...
By Sijie Ma, Zeyuan Ma, Yue-Jiao Gong, Ran Cheng