Global Safe Sequential Learning via Efficient Knowledge Transfer

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Cen-You, Duennbier, Olaf, Toussaint, Marc, Rakitsch, Barbara, Zimmer, Christoph
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Li, Cen-You
Duennbier, Olaf
Toussaint, Marc
Rakitsch, Barbara
Zimmer, Christoph
author_facet Li, Cen-You
Duennbier, Olaf
Toussaint, Marc
Rakitsch, Barbara
Zimmer, Christoph
contents Sequential learning methods, such as active learning and Bayesian optimization, aim to select the most informative data for task learning. In many applications, however, data selection is constrained by unknown safety conditions, motivating the development of safe learning approaches. A promising line of safe learning methods uses Gaussian processes to model safety conditions, restricting data selection to areas with high safety confidence. However, these methods are limited to local exploration around an initial seed dataset, as safety confidence centers around observed data points. As a consequence, task exploration is slowed down and safe regions disconnected from the initial seed dataset remain unexplored. In this paper, we propose safe transfer sequential learning to accelerate task learning and to expand the explorable safe region. By leveraging abundant offline data from a related source task, our approach guides exploration in the target task more effectively. We also provide a theoretical analysis to explain why single-task method cannot cope with disconnected regions. Finally, we introduce a computationally efficient approximation of our method that reduces runtime through pre-computations. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach, compared to state-of-the-art methods, learns tasks with lower data consumption and enhances global exploration across multiple disjoint safe regions, while maintaining comparable computational efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_14402
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Global Safe Sequential Learning via Efficient Knowledge Transfer
Li, Cen-You
Duennbier, Olaf
Toussaint, Marc
Rakitsch, Barbara
Zimmer, Christoph
Machine Learning
Sequential learning methods, such as active learning and Bayesian optimization, aim to select the most informative data for task learning. In many applications, however, data selection is constrained by unknown safety conditions, motivating the development of safe learning approaches. A promising line of safe learning methods uses Gaussian processes to model safety conditions, restricting data selection to areas with high safety confidence. However, these methods are limited to local exploration around an initial seed dataset, as safety confidence centers around observed data points. As a consequence, task exploration is slowed down and safe regions disconnected from the initial seed dataset remain unexplored. In this paper, we propose safe transfer sequential learning to accelerate task learning and to expand the explorable safe region. By leveraging abundant offline data from a related source task, our approach guides exploration in the target task more effectively. We also provide a theoretical analysis to explain why single-task method cannot cope with disconnected regions. Finally, we introduce a computationally efficient approximation of our method that reduces runtime through pre-computations. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach, compared to state-of-the-art methods, learns tasks with lower data consumption and enhances global exploration across multiple disjoint safe regions, while maintaining comparable computational efficiency.
title Global Safe Sequential Learning via Efficient Knowledge Transfer
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14402