51 accepted papers
Decoding-based regression, which reformulates regression as a sequence generation task, has emerged as a promising paradigm of applying large language models for numerical prediction. However, its progress is hindered by the misalignment between discrete token-level objectives (e.g., cross-entropy) …
Chip placement determines the locations of electronic components on a chip layout, which directly impacts performance, power, and area (PPA) metrics, and thus is a critical step in electronic design automation (EDA). As modern chips scale to accommodate millions of components, manual placement by hu…
Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have become the most popular tool for solving widely-existed multi-objective optimization problems. In Multi-Objective EAs (MOEAs), there is increasing interest in using an archive to store non-dominated solutions generated during the search. This approach can 1) mitiga
Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are currently the most popular tool for solving multi-objective optimization problems. Balancing exploration and exploitation is fundamental to the performance of Multi-Objective EAs (MOEAs). Achieving this requires maintaining a set of high-quality solutions for effect
Reward design remains a critical bottleneck in visual reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation. In simulated environments, rewards are conventionally designed based on the distance to a target position. However, such precise positional information is often unavailable in real-world visua…
Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are popular tools for multi-objective optimization (MOO), and have been successfully applied to many real-world MOO problems. However, the theoretical study has lagged behind their practical success and remains largely confined to synthetic pseudo-Bool
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been widely applied to multi-objective optimization due to their population-based nature. Population update, a key component in multi-objective EAs (MOEAs), is usually performed in a greedy, deterministic manner. However, recent studies have questioned this practic
Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES) holds great promise due to its ability to eliminate external incisions, reduce trauma, and accelerate recovery. However, the adoption of NOTES is hindered by the limited capabilities of existing instruments, particularly in achieving the requir
The parallel continuum mechanism offers distinct advantages in the design of surgical manipulators, including enhanced stiffness, improved precision, and a simplified structure compared to traditional Tendon-driven systems. Conventional kinematic models based on constant-curvature assumptions are of
The subset selection problem with a monotone and submodular objective function under a linear cost constraint has wide applications, such as maximum coverage, influence maximization, and feature selection, just to name a few. Various greedy algorithms have been proposed with good performance both th…
Machine learning has increasingly been employed to solve NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, resulting in the emergence of neural solvers that demonstrate remarkable performance, even with minimal domain-specific knowledge. To date, the community has created numerous open-source neural solv…
Offline model-based optimization (MBO) aims to identify a design that maximizes a black-box function using only a fixed, pre-collected dataset of designs and their corresponding scores. This problem has garnered significant attention from both scientific and industrial domains. A common approach in…
Multi-objective decision-making problems have emerged in numerous real-world scenarios, such as video games, navigation and robotics. Considering the clear advantages of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in optimizing decision-making processes, researchers have delved into the development of Multi-Objecti…
Black-Box Optimization (BBO) has found successful applications in many fields of science and engineering. Recently, there has been a growing interest in meta-learning particular components of BBO algorithms to speed up optimization and get rid of tedious hand-crafted heuristics. As an extension, lea
Evolutionary neural architecture search (ENAS) is a key part of evolutionary machine learning, which commonly utilizes evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to automatically design high-performing deep neural architectures. During past years, various ENAS methods have been proposed with exceptional performa…
The performance of an algorithm often critically depends on its hyperparameter configuration. Dynamic algorithm configuration (DAC) is a recent trend in automated machine learning, which can dynamically adjust the algorithm’s configuration during the execution process and relieve users from tedious…
The pursuit of universal black-box optimization (BBO) algorithms is a longstanding goal. However, unlike domains such as language or vision, where scaling structured data has driven generalization, progress in offline BBO remains hindered by the lack of unified representations for heterogeneous nume…
In the area of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs), there is a trend of using an archive to store non-dominated solutions generated during the search. This is because 1) MOEAs may easily end up with the final population containing inferior solutions that are dominated by other solutions…
Selective classification enables models to make predictions only when they are sufficiently confident, aiming to enhance safety and reliability, which is important in high-stakes scenarios. Previous methods mainly use deep neural networks and focus on modifying the architecture of classification lay…
In the real world, there exist a class of optimization problems that multiple (local) optimal solutions in the solution space correspond to a single point in the objective space. In this paper, we theoretically show that for such multimodal problems, a simple method that considers the diversity of s…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for computationally expensive black-box optimization. However, traditional BO methods need to solve new problems from scratch, leading to slow convergence. Recent studies try to extend BO to a transfer learning setup to speed up the optimization, where…
Offline optimization aims to maximize a black-box objective function with a static dataset and has wide applications. In addition to the objective function being black-box and expensive to evaluate, numerous complex real-world problems entail optimizing multiple conflicting objectives, i.e., multi-o…
Peptide vaccines are growing in significance for fighting diverse diseases. Machine learning has improved the identification of peptides that can trigger immune responses, and the main challenge of peptide vaccine design now lies in selecting an effective subset of peptides due to the allelic divers…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms are a new type of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), aiming to find a set of high-performing, yet diverse solutions. They have found many successful applications in reinforcement learning and robotics, helping improve the robustness in complex environments. Furthermore,…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms have emerged as a powerful optimization paradigm with the aim of generating a set of high-quality and diverse solutions. To achieve such a challenging goal, QD algorithms require maintaining a large archive and a large population in each iteration, which brings two…
In modern chip design, placement aims at placing millions of circuit modules, which is an essential step that significantly influences power, performance, and area (PPA) metrics. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising technique for improving placement quality, especially ma…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, as a subset of evolutionary algorithms, have emerged as a powerful optimization paradigm with the aim of generating a set of high-quality and diverse solutions. Although QD has demonstrated competitive performance in reinforcement learning, its low sample efficienc…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient method and has been widely used for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Recently, there has been a considerable interest in BO literature in optimizing functions that are affected by context variable in the environment, which is uncontrollable b…
Machine learning has been adapted to help solve NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. One prevalent way is learning to construct solutions by deep neural networks, which has been receiving more and more attention due to the high efficiency and less requirement for expert knowledge. However, m…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are widely used for multi-objective optimization due to their population-based nature. Traditional multi-objective EAs (MOEAs) generate a large set of solutions to approximate the Pareto front, leaving a decision maker (DM) with the task of selecting a preferred solutio…
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents coordinates with teammate(s) for a shared goal, may sustain non-stationary caused by the policy change of teammates. Prior works mainly concentrate on the policy change cross episodes, ignoring the fact that teammates may suffer f…
Machine learning models have liberated manpower greatly in many real-world tasks, but their predictions are still worse than humans on some specific instances. To improve the performance, it is natural to optimize machine learning models to take decisions for most instances while delivering a few tr…
The development of very large-scale integration (VLSI) technology has posed new challenges for electronic design automation (EDA) techniques in chip floorplanning. During this process, macro placement is an important subproblem, which tries to determine the positions of all macros with the aim of mi…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, a subset of evolutionary algorithms, maintain an archive (i.e., a set of solutions) and simulate the natural evolution process through iterative selection and reproduction, with the goal of generating a set of high-quality and diverse solutions. Though having found…
Diversity is a growing research topic in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Previous research on diversity has mainly focused on promoting diversity to encourage exploration and thereby improve quality (the cumulative reward), maximizing diversity subject to quality constraints, or jointly maximizing qual…
Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (CMARL) has shown to be promising for many real-world applications. Previous works mainly focus on improving coordination ability via solving MARL-specific challenges (e.g., non-stationarity, credit assignment, scalability), but ignore the policy pertur…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been widely and successfully applied to solve multi-objective optimization problems, due to their nature of population-based search. Population update is a key component in multi-objective EAs (MOEAs), and it is performed in a greedy, deterministic manner. That is,…
Submodular maximization arises in many applications, and has attracted a lot of research attentions from various areas such as artificial intelligence, finance and operations research. Previous studies mainly consider only one kind of constraint, while many real-world problems often involve several…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved significant successes, which aims to obtain a single policy maximizing the expected cumulative rewards for a given task. However, in many real-world scenarios, e.g., navigating in complex environments and controlling robots, one may need to find a set of poli…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a class of popular methods for expensive black-box optimization, and has been widely applied to many scenarios. However, BO suffers from the curse of dimensionality, and scaling it to high-dimensional problems is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a variable s…
Automated algorithm configuration relieves users from tedious, trial-and-error tuning tasks. A popular algorithm configuration tuning paradigm is dynamic algorithm configuration (DAC), in which an agent learns dynamic configuration policies across instances by reinforcement learning (RL). However, i…
Neural network pruning is a popular model compression method which can significantly reduce the computing cost with negligible loss of accuracy. Recently, filters are often pruned directly by designing proper criteria or using auxiliary modules to measure their importance, which, however, requires e…
Subset selection, which aims to select a subset from a ground set to maximize some objective function, arises in various applications such as influence maximization and sensor placement. In real-world scenarios, however, one often needs to find a subset which is robust against (i.e., is good over) a…
Machine learning tasks are often formulated as complex optimization problems, where the objective function can be non-differentiable, non-continuous, non-unique, inaccurate, dynamic, and have many local optima, making conventional optimization algorithms fail. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), inspired…
Non-convex optimization is often involved in artificial intelligence tasks, which may have many saddle points, and is NP-hard to solve. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are general-purpose derivative-free optimization algorithms with a good ability to find the global optimum, which can be naturally app…
Subset selection with cost constraints is a fundamental problem with various applications such as influence maximization and sensor placement. The goal is to select a subset from a ground set to maximize a monotone objective function such that a monotone cost function is upper bounded by a budget. P…
Submodular maximization has attracted much attention due to its wide application and attractive property. Previous works mainly considered one single objective function, while there can be multiple ones in practice. As the objectives are usually conflicting, there exists a set of Pareto optimal solu…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach for expensive black-box optimization, with applications including parameter tuning, experimental design, and robotics. BO usually models the objective function by a Gaussian process (GP), and iteratively samples the next data point by maximizing an ac…
Evolution Strategies (ES) are a class of black-box optimization algorithms and have been widely applied to solve problems, e.g., in reinforcement learning (RL), where the true gradient is unavailable. ES estimate the gradient of an objective function with respect to the parameters by randomly sampli…
The problem of selecting the best $k$-element subset from a universe is involved in many applications. While previous studies assumed a noise-free environment or a noisy monotone submodular objective function, this paper considers a more realistic and general situation where the evaluation of a subs…
Selecting the optimal subset from a large set of variables is a fundamental problem in various learning tasks such as feature selection, sparse regression, dictionary learning, etc. In this paper, we propose the POSS approach which employs evolutionary Pareto optimization to find a small-sized subse…