Finding all modes of a multimodal black-box function is a fundamental challenge in optimization, Bayesian inference, and scientific computing. Existing approaches -- basin-hopping, CMA-ES, multistart gradient descent -- operate sequentially and cannot exploit the massive parallelism of modern GPU hardware.
arXiv:2609.37899v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Zero-order optimization (ZO) trains without backpropagation, making it relevant to forward-only hardware and non-differentiable loss, but its gradient...
By Francois Chaubard, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, Chris R\'e
arXiv:2609.38095v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) dominates deep learning but imposes a massive memory tax. For example, training OPT-30B with Adam requires $\approx$ 600GB of GPU...
By Francois Chaubard, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, Chris R\'e
arXiv:2603. 21180v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sequential experimental design under expensive, gradient-free objectives is a central challenge in computational statistics: evaluation budgets are tightly constrained and information must be extracted efficiently from each observation.
By Foo Hui-Mean, Yuan-chin I Chang
arXiv:2609.06196v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We study the computational effort required for global optimization of a smooth, possibly nonconvex objective $\Gamma:\mathbb{R}^d\to\mathbb{R}$. An a...
By Ioannis Kontoyiannis, Sean Meyn
arXiv:2605. 09708v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Metal-Sci, a 10-task benchmark of scientific Apple Silicon Metal compute kernels spanning six optimization regimes (stencils, all-pairs in $n$-body problems, multi-field Boltzmann, neighbor-list molecular dynamics, multi-kernel PDE, FFT).
By V\'ictor Gallego