Probabilistic Smoothing with Ratio-Monotone Transforms

Probabilistic Smoothing with Ratio-Monotone Transforms for Global Optimization

This paper proposes a generalized probabilistic smoothing framework for global optimization that replaces Gaussian kernels with flexible symmetric unimodal kernels combined with monotonic ratio-based transformations. The authors prove that the smoothed objective preserves the global maximizer and that stationary points concentrate near the true optimum under large amplification, without requiring a decreasing smoothing schedule. Explicit complexity bounds for stochastic gradient ascent are derived, and a leave-one-out baseline is shown to provably reduce variance. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks and black-box adversarial attacks demonstrate improved robustness over existing methods.