[tux3]

This is the same sort of "more guesses faster beats smarter guesses slower" that made afl-fuzz by far the best at exploring large search spaces in program fuzzing

Fast search often beats accurate search. Sometimes adding clever heuristics or more complex scoring "works" but slows down the search enough that it's an overall loss. Another kind of a bitter lesson, perhaps

[lqr]

But why isn't the proposed method an instance of smart guessing? It reduces oracle complexity with heuristics. The heuristic is "build a machine learning model of the objective function and use it to fake oracle queries most of the time."