Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Zi, Dahl, George E., Swersky, Kevin, Lee, Chansoo, Nado, Zachary, Gilmer, Justin, Snoek, Jasper, Ghahramani, Zoubin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08215
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929447192494080
author Wang, Zi
Dahl, George E.
Swersky, Kevin
Lee, Chansoo
Nado, Zachary
Gilmer, Justin
Snoek, Jasper
Ghahramani, Zoubin
author_facet Wang, Zi
Dahl, George E.
Swersky, Kevin
Lee, Chansoo
Nado, Zachary
Gilmer, Justin
Snoek, Jasper
Ghahramani, Zoubin
contents Bayesian optimization (BO) has become a popular strategy for global optimization of expensive real-world functions. Contrary to a common expectation that BO is suited to optimizing black-box functions, it actually requires domain knowledge about those functions to deploy BO successfully. Such domain knowledge often manifests in Gaussian process (GP) priors that specify initial beliefs on functions. However, even with expert knowledge, it is non-trivial to quantitatively define a prior. This is especially true for hyperparameter tuning problems on complex machine learning models, where landscapes of tuning objectives are often difficult to comprehend. We seek an alternative practice for setting these functional priors. In particular, we consider the scenario where we have data from similar functions that allow us to pre-train a tighter distribution a priori. We detail what pre-training entails for GPs using a KL divergence based loss function, and propose a new pre-training based BO framework named HyperBO. Theoretically, we show bounded posterior predictions and near-zero regrets for HyperBO without assuming the "ground truth" GP prior is known. To verify our approach in realistic setups, we collect a large multi-task hyperparameter tuning dataset by training tens of thousands of configurations of near-state-of-the-art deep learning models on popular image and text datasets, as well as a protein sequence dataset. Our results show that on average, HyperBO is able to locate good hyperparameters at least 3 times more efficiently than the best competing methods on both our new tuning dataset and existing multi-task BO benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2109_08215
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pre-trained Gaussian Processes for Bayesian Optimization
Wang, Zi
Dahl, George E.
Swersky, Kevin
Lee, Chansoo
Nado, Zachary
Gilmer, Justin
Snoek, Jasper
Ghahramani, Zoubin
Machine Learning
Bayesian optimization (BO) has become a popular strategy for global optimization of expensive real-world functions. Contrary to a common expectation that BO is suited to optimizing black-box functions, it actually requires domain knowledge about those functions to deploy BO successfully. Such domain knowledge often manifests in Gaussian process (GP) priors that specify initial beliefs on functions. However, even with expert knowledge, it is non-trivial to quantitatively define a prior. This is especially true for hyperparameter tuning problems on complex machine learning models, where landscapes of tuning objectives are often difficult to comprehend. We seek an alternative practice for setting these functional priors. In particular, we consider the scenario where we have data from similar functions that allow us to pre-train a tighter distribution a priori. We detail what pre-training entails for GPs using a KL divergence based loss function, and propose a new pre-training based BO framework named HyperBO. Theoretically, we show bounded posterior predictions and near-zero regrets for HyperBO without assuming the "ground truth" GP prior is known. To verify our approach in realistic setups, we collect a large multi-task hyperparameter tuning dataset by training tens of thousands of configurations of near-state-of-the-art deep learning models on popular image and text datasets, as well as a protein sequence dataset. Our results show that on average, HyperBO is able to locate good hyperparameters at least 3 times more efficiently than the best competing methods on both our new tuning dataset and existing multi-task BO benchmarks.
title Pre-trained Gaussian Processes for Bayesian Optimization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08215