Black-Box Optimization (BBO) methods can find optimal policies for systems that interact with complex environments with no analytical representation. As such, they are of interest in many Artificial Intelligence (AI) domains. Yet classical BBO methods fall short in high-dimensional non-convex problems. They are thus often overlooked in real-world AI tasks. Here we present a BBO method, termed Explicit Gradient Learning (EGL), that is designed to optimize high-dimensional ill-behaved functions. We derive EGL by finding weak spots in methods that fit the objective function with a parametric Neural Network (NN) model and obtain the gradient signal by calculating the parametric gradient. Instead of fitting the function, EGL trains a NN to estimate the objective gradient directly. We prove the convergence of EGL to a stationary point and its robustness in the optimization of integrable functions. We evaluate EGL and achieve state-of-the-art results in two challenging problems: (1) the COCO test suite against an assortment of standard BBO methods; and (2) in a high-dimensional non-convex image generation task.

This paper considers a new, complex problem of UAV/UGV collaborative efforts to search and capture attackers under uncertainty. The goal of the defenders (UAV/UGV team) is to stop all attackers as quickly as possible, before they arrive at their selected goal. The uncertainty considered is twofold: the defenders do not know the attackers' location and destination, and there is also uncertainty in the defenders' sensing. We suggest a real-time algorithmic framework for the defenders, combining entropy and stochastic-temporal belief, that aims at optimizing the probability of a quick and successful capture of all of the attackers. We have empirically evaluated the algorithmic framework, and have shown its efficiency and significant performance improvement compared to other solutions.

Area coverage is an important task for mobile robots, mainly due to its applicability in many domains, such as search and rescue. In this paper we study the problem of multi-robot coverage, in which the robots must obey a strong communication restriction: they should maintain connectivity between teammates throughout the coverage. We formally describe the Multi-Robot Connected Tree Coverage problem, and an algorithm for covering perfect N-ary trees while adhering to the communication requirement. The algorithm is analyzed theoretically, providing guarantees for coverage time by the notion of speedup factor. We enhance the theoretically-proven solution with a dripping heuristic algorithm, and show in extensive simulations that it significantly decreases the coverage time. The algorithm is then adjusted to general (not necessarily perfect) N-ary trees and additional experiments prove its efficiency. Furthermore, we show the use of our solution in a simulated officebuilding scenario. Finally, we deploy our algorithm on real robots in a real office building setting, showing efficient coverage time in practice.