aiqbench analysis
This research advances black-box optimization by introducing adaptive partitioning schemes that learn flexible domain structures using neural network surrogates. The method significantly improves simple regret metrics compared to existing state-of-the-art algorithms like SequOOL and enables a 10% performance gain in quantized LLMs via Activation-aware Weight Quantization.
Adaptive Partitioning Schemes for Optimistic Optimization
arXiv:2610.04039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Applications such as engineering design often require us to optimize a black-box function, i.e., a system whose inner processing is not analytically known and whose gradients are not available. Practitioners often have a fixed budget for the number of function evaluations and the performance of an optimization algorithm is measured by its simple regret. In this paper, we study the class of "Optimistic Optimization" algorithms for black-box optimization that use a partitioning scheme for the domain. We develop algorithms that learn a good partitioning scheme and use flexible surrogate models such as neural networks in the optimization procedure. For multi-index functions on an $m$-dimensional subspace within $d$ dimensions, our algorithm attains $\tilde{O}(n^{-\beta / d})$ regret, where $\beta = 1 + \frac{d-m}{2m-1}$, as opposed to $\tilde{O}(n^{-1/d})$ for SequOOL, a state-of-the-art optimistic optimization algorithm. We use our approach to improve the quality of Activation-aware Weight Quantization (AWQ) of the OPT-1.3B model, achieving $\sim10\%$ improvement in performance relative to the best possible unquantized model.
Abstract:Applications such as engineering design often require us to optimize a black-box function, i.e., a system whose inner processing is not analytically known and whose gradients are not available. Practitioners often have a fixed budget for the number of function evaluations and the performance of an optimization algorithm is measured by its simple regret. In this paper, we study the class of "Optimistic Optimization" algorithms for black-box optimization that use a partitioning scheme for the domain. We develop algorithms that learn a good partitioning scheme and use flexible surrogate models such as neural networks in the optimization procedure. For multi-index functions on an $m$-dimensional subspace within $d$ dimensions, our algorithm attains $\tilde{O}(n^{-\beta / d})$ regret, where $\beta = 1 + \frac{d-m}{2m-1}$, as opposed to $\tilde{O}(n^{-1/d})$ for SequOOL, a state-of-the-art optimistic optimization algorithm. We use our approach to improve the quality of Activation-aware Weight Quantization (AWQ) of the OPT-1.3B model, achieving $\sim10\%$ improvement in performance relative to the best possible unquantized model.
Machine Learning (stat.ML); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2610.04039 [stat.ML]
(or arXiv:2610.04039v1 [stat.ML] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.04039 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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