Stein Variational Black-Box Combinatorial Optimization

arXiv:2604.15837v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Combinatorial black-box optimization in high-dimensional settings demands a careful trade-off between exploiting promising regions of the search space and preserving sufficient exploration to identify multiple optima. Although Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) provide a powerful model-based framework, they often concentrate on a single region of interest, which may result in premature convergence when facing complex or multimodal objecti