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Main Authors: Xu, Wenjie, Wang, Wenbin, Jiang, Yuning, Svetozarevic, Bratislav, Jones, Colin N.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05367
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author Xu, Wenjie
Wang, Wenbin
Jiang, Yuning
Svetozarevic, Bratislav
Jones, Colin N.
author_facet Xu, Wenjie
Wang, Wenbin
Jiang, Yuning
Svetozarevic, Bratislav
Jones, Colin N.
contents We study the problem of preferential Bayesian optimization (BO), where we aim to optimize a black-box function with only preference feedback over a pair of candidate solutions. Inspired by the likelihood ratio idea, we construct a confidence set of the black-box function using only the preference feedback. An optimistic algorithm with an efficient computational method is then developed to solve the problem, which enjoys an information-theoretic bound on the total cumulative regret, a first-of-its-kind for preferential BO. This bound further allows us to design a scheme to report an estimated best solution, with a guaranteed convergence rate. Experimental results on sampled instances from Gaussian processes, standard test functions, and a thermal comfort optimization problem all show that our method stably achieves better or competitive performance as compared to the existing state-of-the-art heuristics, which, however, do not have theoretical guarantees on regret bounds or convergence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_05367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Principled Preferential Bayesian Optimization
Xu, Wenjie
Wang, Wenbin
Jiang, Yuning
Svetozarevic, Bratislav
Jones, Colin N.
Machine Learning
We study the problem of preferential Bayesian optimization (BO), where we aim to optimize a black-box function with only preference feedback over a pair of candidate solutions. Inspired by the likelihood ratio idea, we construct a confidence set of the black-box function using only the preference feedback. An optimistic algorithm with an efficient computational method is then developed to solve the problem, which enjoys an information-theoretic bound on the total cumulative regret, a first-of-its-kind for preferential BO. This bound further allows us to design a scheme to report an estimated best solution, with a guaranteed convergence rate. Experimental results on sampled instances from Gaussian processes, standard test functions, and a thermal comfort optimization problem all show that our method stably achieves better or competitive performance as compared to the existing state-of-the-art heuristics, which, however, do not have theoretical guarantees on regret bounds or convergence.
title Principled Preferential Bayesian Optimization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05367