Constrained optimization problems can be difficult because their search spaces have properties not conducive to search, e.g., multimodality, discontinuities, or deception. Peter Bentley discusses the Constrained Optimization in Latent Space (COIL), which uses a VAE to generate a learned latent representation from a dataset comprising samples from the valid region of the search space according to a constraint, thus enabling the optimizer to find the objective in the new space defined by the learned representation.

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Image courtesy of interviewee. January 31, 2023