Explicit Gradient Learning for Black-Box Optimization
ICML, pp. 8480-8490, 2020.
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Abstract:
Black-Box Optimization (BBO) methods can find optimal policies for systems that interact with complex environments with no analytical representation. As such, they are of interest in many Artificial Intelligence (AI) domains. Yet classical BBO methods fall short in high-dimensional non-convex problems. They are thus often overlooked in re...More
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Introduction
- Optimization problems are prevalent in many artificial intelligence applications, from search-and-rescue optimal deployment (Zhen et al, 2014) to triage policy in emergency rooms (Rosemarin et al, 2019) to hyperparameter tuning in machine learning (Bardenet et al, 2013)
- In these tasks, the objective is to find a policy that minimizes a cost or maximizes a reward.
- Derivative-based methods are restricted to differentiable functions, but here the authors show that EGL can be applied successfully whenever the objective function is merely locally integrable
Highlights
- Optimization problems are prevalent in many artificial intelligence applications, from search-and-rescue optimal deployment (Zhen et al, 2014) to triage policy in emergency rooms (Rosemarin et al, 2019) to hyperparameter tuning in machine learning (Bardenet et al, 2013)
- Many Black-Box Optimization methods operate with a two-phase iterative algorithm: (1) search or collect data with some heuristic; and (2) update a model to obtain a new candidate solution and improve the heuristic
- We presented Explicit Gradient Learning, a derivative-based Black-Box Optimization algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of optimization problems
- Decreasing it lets Explicit Gradient Learning converge to a local minimum
- The concept of Explicit Gradient Learning can be generalized to other related fields, such as sequential decision-making problems (i.e. Reinforcement Learning), by directly learning the gradient of the Q-function
- We demonstrated the use of Explicit Gradient Learning in an applicative high-dimensional Black-Box problem, searching the latent space of generative models
Methods
- Design & Analysis
the authors lay out the practical EGL algorithm and analyze its asymptotic properties.
4.1. - For a model gθ : Ω → Rn and a dataset Dk = {}m i=1, define the loss function m Lk,ε(θ) =.
- I=1 xj ∈Vε and learn θk∗ = arg minθ Lk,ε(θ), e.g. with gradient descent.
- This formulation can be used to estimate the mean-gradient for any x.
- The authors assume that the dataset Dk holds samples only from Vε
Conclusion
- The authors presented EGL, a derivative-based BBO algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of optimization problems.
- Starting with a high smoothness factor, let EGL find global areas in the function with low valleys.
- Decreasing it lets EGL converge to a local minimum.
- The concept of EGL can be generalized to other related fields, such as sequential decision-making problems (i.e. Reinforcement Learning), by directly learning the gradient of the Q-function.
- The authors demonstrated the use of EGL in an applicative high-dimensional Black-Box problem, searching the latent space of generative models
Summary
Introduction:
Optimization problems are prevalent in many artificial intelligence applications, from search-and-rescue optimal deployment (Zhen et al, 2014) to triage policy in emergency rooms (Rosemarin et al, 2019) to hyperparameter tuning in machine learning (Bardenet et al, 2013)- In these tasks, the objective is to find a policy that minimizes a cost or maximizes a reward.
- Derivative-based methods are restricted to differentiable functions, but here the authors show that EGL can be applied successfully whenever the objective function is merely locally integrable
Methods:
Design & Analysis
the authors lay out the practical EGL algorithm and analyze its asymptotic properties.
4.1.- For a model gθ : Ω → Rn and a dataset Dk = {}m i=1, define the loss function m Lk,ε(θ) =.
- I=1 xj ∈Vε and learn θk∗ = arg minθ Lk,ε(θ), e.g. with gradient descent.
- This formulation can be used to estimate the mean-gradient for any x.
- The authors assume that the dataset Dk holds samples only from Vε
Conclusion:
The authors presented EGL, a derivative-based BBO algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of optimization problems.- Starting with a high smoothness factor, let EGL find global areas in the function with low valleys.
- Decreasing it lets EGL converge to a local minimum.
- The concept of EGL can be generalized to other related fields, such as sequential decision-making problems (i.e. Reinforcement Learning), by directly learning the gradient of the Q-function.
- The authors demonstrated the use of EGL in an applicative high-dimensional Black-Box problem, searching the latent space of generative models
Related work
- BBO problems have been studied in multiple fields with diverse approaches. Many works investigated derivative–free methods (Rios & Sahinidis, 2013), from the classic Nelder–Mead algorithm (Nelder & Mead, 1965) and Powell’s method (Powell, 1964) to more recent evolutionary algorithms such as CMA-ES (Hansen, 2006). Another line of research is derivative-based algorithms, which first approximate the gradient and then apply line-search methods such as the Conjugate Gradient (CG) Method (Shewchuk et al, 1994) and Quasi-Newton Methods, e.g. BFGS (Nocedal & Wright, 2006). Other model-based methods such as SLSQP (Bonnans et al, 2006) and COBYLA (Powell, 2007) iteratively solve quadratic or linear approximations of the objective function. Some variants apply trust-region methods and iteratively find an optimum within a trusted subset of the domain (Conn et al, 2009; Chen et al, 2018). Another line of research is more focused on stochastic discrete problems, e.g. Bayesian methods (Snoek et al, 2015), and multi-armed bandit problems (Flaxman et al, 2004).
Funding
- This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Science & Technology, Israel
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