Improving the efficiency and robustness of black-box optimisation

In classical nonlinear optimisation, the availability of first-order information is crucial to constructing accurate local models for the objective and finding descent directions. However, when the objective function is black-box and computationally expensive or stochastic, gradients may be too expensive to compute or too inaccurate to be useful. In this setting, derivative-free optimisation (DFO) provides an alternative class of algorithm. In this talk, I will present new techniques for model-based DFO, which yield an improvement in the efficiency and robustness of existing methods for general minimisation and nonlinear least-squares problems.