A divergence-based condition to ensure quantile improvement in black-box global optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Guilmeau, Thomas, Chouzenoux, Emilie, Elvira, Víctor
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Guilmeau, Thomas
Chouzenoux, Emilie
Elvira, Víctor
author_facet Guilmeau, Thomas
Chouzenoux, Emilie
Elvira, Víctor
contents Black-box global optimization aims at minimizing an objective function whose analytical form is not known. To do so, many state-of-the-art methods rely on sampling-based strategies, where sampling distributions are built in an iterative fashion, so that their mass concentrate where the objective function is low. Despite empirical success, the theoretical study of these methods remains difficult. In this work, we introduce a new framework, based on divergence-decrease conditions, to study and design black-box global optimization algorithms. Our approach allows to establish and quantify the improvement of proposals at each iteration, in terms of expected value or quantile of the objective. We show that the information-geometric optimization approach fits within our framework, yielding a new approach for its analysis. We also establish proposal improvement results for two novel algorithms, one related with the cross-entropy approach with mixture models, and another one using heavy-tailed sampling proposal distributions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_01277
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A divergence-based condition to ensure quantile improvement in black-box global optimization
Guilmeau, Thomas
Chouzenoux, Emilie
Elvira, Víctor
Optimization and Control
90C26 (Primary) 90C59, 65K05 (Secondary)
Black-box global optimization aims at minimizing an objective function whose analytical form is not known. To do so, many state-of-the-art methods rely on sampling-based strategies, where sampling distributions are built in an iterative fashion, so that their mass concentrate where the objective function is low. Despite empirical success, the theoretical study of these methods remains difficult. In this work, we introduce a new framework, based on divergence-decrease conditions, to study and design black-box global optimization algorithms. Our approach allows to establish and quantify the improvement of proposals at each iteration, in terms of expected value or quantile of the objective. We show that the information-geometric optimization approach fits within our framework, yielding a new approach for its analysis. We also establish proposal improvement results for two novel algorithms, one related with the cross-entropy approach with mixture models, and another one using heavy-tailed sampling proposal distributions.
title A divergence-based condition to ensure quantile improvement in black-box global optimization
topic Optimization and Control
90C26 (Primary) 90C59, 65K05 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01277