arXiv:2606. 00366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of generating a large collection of initial guesses for local minima of multimodal non-convex continuous optimization problems.
arXiv:2606. 00862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have been widely used for expensive black-box optimization problems.
arXiv:2606. 07841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Black-box variational inference (BBVI) is a methodology for posterior approximation that relies on stochastic optimization.
arXiv:2606. 01081v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision-focused learning (DFL) trains predictive models by optimizing downstream decision quality rather than standalone prediction accuracy.
GRAPE is a two‑stage Bayesian optimization framework that first refines the local gradient posterior using a closed‑form acquisition function and then selects update directions by maximizing expected decrease conditioned on descent. The authors prove that the refinement stage monotonically reduces local uncertainty and that the progress‑aware direction converges to true steepest descent as the posterior sharpens. Empirical results show GRAPE achieves a 5.4× speedup on black‑box adversarial attacks and reduces final average regret by 3.8 log‑units on large language model prompt‑optimization tasks.
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.
The paper introduces a data‑free learning objective called relative trajectory balance for training diffusion models to sample from a posterior defined by a diffusion prior and an arbitrary black‑box constraint or likelihood. It proves asymptotic correctness of this objective and demonstrates its use across vision, language, and multimodal tasks, including classifier guidance, language infilling, and text‑to‑image generation. Additionally, the method is applied to continuous control with a score‑based behavior prior, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results in offline reinforcement learning.
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.
The paper introduces Gradient-based Sample Selection Bayesian Optimization (GSSBO), a method that builds the Gaussian process surrogate on a strategically chosen subset of samples rather than the full dataset. By using gradient information to eliminate redundant points while keeping diversity and representativeness, GSSBO achieves sublinear regret bounds and reduces the cubic computational cost of standard BO. Experiments on synthetic and real-world tasks show that this approach maintains comparable optimization performance while significantly cutting GP fitting time and resource usage.
The paper introduces Solver-Gradient Guided Reinforcement Learning (SG‑RL), a method that augments standard RL with bounded gradients from a differentiable MPC solver to adapt cost‑function weights online. SG‑RL integrates solver‑gradient guidance into PPO through actor‑update scaling, policy loss, advantage estimation, and value‑function learning, achieving comparable or superior closed‑loop performance while requiring up to 70.6% fewer samples. Experiments on two autonomous racing platforms with intentional model mismatch demonstrate that SG‑RL outperforms both RL and gradient‑based policy learning baselines and generalizes zero‑shot to unseen environments.
arXiv:2607. 23404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-driving laboratories increasingly rely on multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization (MFBO) to balance cheap, approximate evaluations against scarce, expensive ones, with a predictive surrogate at its core.
arXiv:2601. 06487v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has substantially improved the performance of LLM agents on tasks with verifiable outcomes, but it still struggles on open-ended agent tasks with vast solution spaces (e.