The paper investigates why neural network surrogates sometimes improve and sometimes worsen derivative‑free optimisation performance. It identifies three key factors—role (whether the surrogate proposes candidates or replaces gradients), radius (the neighbourhood within which a local model is reliable), and room (whether the base method can still progress)—that determine when a learned local model is beneficial. Experiments on 117 benchmark instances show that providing surrogate‑approved candidates boosts success rates, while replacing gradients or ignoring the radius can reduce them.
arXiv:2608. 01130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A broad range of models face the mismatch where they are updated through trajectory losses but are evaluated by downstream task reward.
arXiv:2606. 02876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Randomized smoothing (RS) uses a smoothed classifier to provide architecture-agnostic certificates of $\ell_2$ classification robustness, but its dependence on per-input Monte Carlo (MC) sampling undermines its use in real-time systems.
arXiv:2608. 03197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by seeking parameters whose loss is robust to local adversarial perturbations, but the quantitative mechanism underlying its implicit bias toward flat minima remains unclear.
arXiv:2609.24021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators are data-driven models that learn mappings from inputs that parameterize partial differential equations, such as spatially varying c...
arXiv:2608. 01378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Design campaigns in chemistry, materials science, and machine learning share a bottleneck: determining how good a candidate truly is requires an expensive evaluation - an experiment, a first-principles simulation, or a full training run.
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by seeking parameters whose loss is robust to local adversarial perturbations, but the quantitative mechanism underlying its implicit bias toward flat minima remains unclear. In particular, the perturbation radius $ρ$ is typically treated as an isolated tuning parameter, despite defining the neighborhood in which SAM measures sharpness.
arXiv:2606. 27354v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural surrogate models offer fast approximate mappings from PDE parameters to solutions, but they typically treat solving as a purely statistical task: once trained, they struggle to correct their own constraint violations and extrapolate beyond the training distribution.
arXiv:2609.00892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning decomposes open-ended instructions into prompt-specific, flexible rubrics, making it better suited than reinforceme...
arXiv:2606. 29119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce a pre-registered screening rule that decides, before any implementation, whether an evolutionary / population / lifecycle outer loop over neural-network parameters or structure is worth building.
The paper introduces Repeated Optimizer Resampling (ROR), a method that treats optimizer choice as a hyperparameter and searches for the best optimizer during a single training run. ROR periodically scouts each candidate optimizer for a short number of epochs, then continues training with the best scout, allowing the optimizer to change over time. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion‑MNIST, and motor insurance claim‑count models show that one‑epoch ROR uses only 24–35% of the training effort required to exhaustively evaluate all optimizers while achieving comparable performance.
The paper introduces Online Surrogate Repair (OSR), a closed‑loop algorithm that decouples the frequency of high‑fidelity evaluations from the length of an agent’s search by selectively updating a surrogate model with sparse, high‑fidelity data. An acquisition rule determines which candidate designs receive expensive evaluations, and the resulting labels refine the surrogate for subsequent episodes. Experiments on synthetic environments and the MADE benchmark show that OSR can reduce regret more efficiently than fixed‑surrogate approaches, requiring fewer oracle queries than high‑fidelity feedback after every episode.
arXiv:2607. 09967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many neural networks operations have a multiplicative nature rather than additive: halving or doubling a norm are analogous relatively but require unequal optimization distances when taking linear steps.