A Principle for Global Optimization with Gradients

Abstract: This work demonstrates the utility of gradients for the global optimization of certain differentiable functions with many suboptimal local minima. To this end, a principle for generating search directions from non-local quadratic approximants based on gradients of the objective function is analyzed. Experiments measure the quality of non-local search directions as well as the performance of a proposed simplistic algorithm, of the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES), and of a randomly reinitialized Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) method.