4,496 research outputs found
KL-based Control of the Learning Schedule for Surrogate Black-Box Optimization
This paper investigates the control of an ML component within the Covariance
Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) devoted to black-box
optimization. The known CMA-ES weakness is its sample complexity, the number of
evaluations of the objective function needed to approximate the global optimum.
This weakness is commonly addressed through surrogate optimization, learning an
estimate of the objective function a.k.a. surrogate model, and replacing most
evaluations of the true objective function with the (inexpensive) evaluation of
the surrogate model. This paper presents a principled control of the learning
schedule (when to relearn the surrogate model), based on the Kullback-Leibler
divergence of the current search distribution and the training distribution of
the former surrogate model. The experimental validation of the proposed
approach shows significant performance gains on a comprehensive set of
ill-conditioned benchmark problems, compared to the best state of the art
including the quasi-Newton high-precision BFGS method
Sharp Oracle Inequalities for Aggregation of Affine Estimators
We consider the problem of combining a (possibly uncountably infinite) set of
affine estimators in non-parametric regression model with heteroscedastic
Gaussian noise. Focusing on the exponentially weighted aggregate, we prove a
PAC-Bayesian type inequality that leads to sharp oracle inequalities in
discrete but also in continuous settings. The framework is general enough to
cover the combinations of various procedures such as least square regression,
kernel ridge regression, shrinking estimators and many other estimators used in
the literature on statistical inverse problems. As a consequence, we show that
the proposed aggregate provides an adaptive estimator in the exact minimax
sense without neither discretizing the range of tuning parameters nor splitting
the set of observations. We also illustrate numerically the good performance
achieved by the exponentially weighted aggregate
A review of domain adaptation without target labels
Domain adaptation has become a prominent problem setting in machine learning
and related fields. This review asks the question: how can a classifier learn
from a source domain and generalize to a target domain? We present a
categorization of approaches, divided into, what we refer to as, sample-based,
feature-based and inference-based methods. Sample-based methods focus on
weighting individual observations during training based on their importance to
the target domain. Feature-based methods revolve around on mapping, projecting
and representing features such that a source classifier performs well on the
target domain and inference-based methods incorporate adaptation into the
parameter estimation procedure, for instance through constraints on the
optimization procedure. Additionally, we review a number of conditions that
allow for formulating bounds on the cross-domain generalization error. Our
categorization highlights recurring ideas and raises questions important to
further research.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure
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