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:2607. 27953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) underpin many real-world decisions, but their exponentially large search spaces make high-quality solutions costly to obtain.
arXiv:2602. 08261v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Auto-bidding systems strive to maximize marketing value while maintaining high compliance with efficiency constraints, such as Target Cost-Per-Action (CPA).
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.
arXiv:2607. 23408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Expensive black-box optimization is ubiquitous in science and engineering, where function evaluations are costly and the evaluation budget is limited.
arXiv:2606. 00862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have been widely used for expensive black-box optimization problems.
arXiv:2605. 04267v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive multi-objective optimization systems face a budget allocation dilemma: one can spend resources on expensive objective evaluations or on eliciting decision-maker preferences that identify the relevant region of the Pareto set.
arXiv:2501. 17377v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising approach for solving Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems, such as the 3D Bin Packing Problem (3D-BPP), Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), or Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), but these neural solvers often exhibit brittleness when facing distribution shifts.
arXiv:2409. 11535v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many decision-support systems recommend actions by optimizing measurable objectives, even when a human decision-maker retains final authority and considers additional criteria that are difficult to specify in advance.
arXiv:2602. 07764v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) seeks to train agents capable of balancing conflicting objectives.
arXiv:2608. 02612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Formulating an optimization problem strongly affects the quality of the final solution, yet good formulations usually require substantial expertise.
arXiv:2608. 17180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contextual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) seeks to generalize classical RL by maximizing task coverage across a context space of related tasks.
arXiv:2606. 15115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective optimization (MOO) has emerged as a powerful approach to solving complex optimization problems involving multiple objectives.