No free lunch theorems for optimization
By David Hilton Wolpert, William G. Macready. 1997
Subfields: Evaluation & Benchmarks
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Evaluation & Benchmarks
- Frank Hutter
- Seyedali Mirjalili
- Carlos Artemio Coello Coello
- Xin-She Yang
- Xin Yao
- Marc-André Zöller
- Marco F. Huber
- Bogdan Gabrys
Citations in the corpus
- Scaling Laws for the Few-Shot Adaptation of Pre-trained Image Classifiers (2021, background): “According to the no free lunch theorem (Wolpert & Macready, 1997), not if we consider all possible data-generating distributions.”
- Hyper-Parameter Optimization: A Review of Algorithms and Applications (2020, background): “The no free lunch theorem suggests that the computational cost for any optimization problem is the same for all problems and no solution offers a shortcut (Wolpert and Macready, 1997; Igel, 2014).”
- Survey on Automated Machine Learning (2019, methodology): “According to the no free lunch theorem (Wolpert and Macready, 1997) it is impossible that a single optimization algorithm is universally superior to any other optimization algorithm.”
- Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Reinforcement Learning (2016, background): “The difficulty in applying existing search heuristics to newly encountered problems - or even new instances of a similar problem - is a well-known challenge that stems from the No Free Lunch theorem (Wolpert & Macready, 1997).”
- Generalisation in humans and deep neural networks (2018, neutral): “Our results, based on 82,880 psychophysical trials under well-controlled lab conditions, demonstrate that there are still marked differences in the way humans and current DNNs process (6)The no free lunch theorem [62] states that better performance on some input is necessarily accompanied by worse p”
- Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence (2007, background): “Some, such as Edmonds (2006), argue that universal intelligence is impossible due to Wolpert’s so called ‘‘No Free Lunch’’ theorem (Wolpert and Macready 1997).”
- Exploring protein fitness landscapes by directed evolution (2009, neutral): “As with any optimization problem, the structure of the objective function (the fitness landscape) influences the effectiveness of a search strateg”
- Occam's razor is insufficient to infer the preferences of irrational agents (2017, methodology): “A No Free Lunch result analogous to theirs applies in our case; both resemble the No Free Lunch theorems for optimisation [Wolpert and Macready, 1997].”
- Reinforcement Learning with a Corrupted Reward Channel (2017, positive): “Similar to the No Free Lunch theorems for optimisation [Wolpert and Macready, 1997], the following theorem for CRMDPs says that without some assumption about what the reward corruption can look like, all agents are essentially lost.”
- Similarity measures for identifying material parameters from hysteresis loops using inverse analysis (2018, background): “It is worth to note that different optimization techniques which appear to solve some inverse analyses well, may struggle on other particular inverse problems as principle of the No Free Lunch theorem [25].”
- Optimizing connection weights in neural networks using the whale optimization algorithm (2016, methodology): “According to the no-free-lunch theorem (NFL), there is no superior optimization algorithm in all optimization problems (Wolpert and Macready 1997; Ho and Pepyne 2002).”
- Gaussian Processes for history-matching: application to an unconventional gas reservoir (2017, background): “We should also note that as per the “no free lunch theorem” for optimization and search problems [72], finding a universal history-matching approach is theoretically impossible [8].”
- An effective hybrid genetic algorithm and tabu search for flexible job shop scheduling problem (2016, methodology): “And no algorithm can solve all types of optimization problems based on the No Free Lunch Theorem (Wolpert and Macready, 1997).”