arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

A Survey of Features Used for Representing Black-box Single-objective Continuous Optimization

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 Machine Learning
Oct 15

In-Context Batch Black-box Optimization via Flow Matching

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 AI
Jul 28

DecoupleMix: Decoupled Ratio Search and Convex Allocation for Scalable VLM Data Recipes

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