Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nguyen, Quan, Sarkar, Anindya, Garnett, Roman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15031
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910458627227648
author Nguyen, Quan
Sarkar, Anindya
Garnett, Roman
author_facet Nguyen, Quan
Sarkar, Anindya
Garnett, Roman
contents Active search formalizes a specialized active learning setting where the goal is to collect members of a rare, valuable class. The state-of-the-art algorithm approximates the optimal Bayesian policy in a budget-aware manner, and has been shown to achieve impressive empirical performance in previous work. However, even this approximate policy has a superlinear computational complexity with respect to the size of the search problem, rendering its application impractical in large spaces or in real-time systems where decisions must be made quickly. We study the amortization of this policy by training a neural network to learn to search. To circumvent the difficulty of learning from scratch, we appeal to imitation learning techniques to mimic the behavior of the expert, expensive-to-compute policy. Our policy network, trained on synthetic data, learns a beneficial search strategy that yields nonmyopic decisions carefully balancing exploration and exploitation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our policy achieves competitive performance at real-world tasks that closely approximates the expert's at a fraction of the cost, while outperforming cheaper baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_15031
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Amortized nonmyopic active search via deep imitation learning
Nguyen, Quan
Sarkar, Anindya
Garnett, Roman
Machine Learning
Active search formalizes a specialized active learning setting where the goal is to collect members of a rare, valuable class. The state-of-the-art algorithm approximates the optimal Bayesian policy in a budget-aware manner, and has been shown to achieve impressive empirical performance in previous work. However, even this approximate policy has a superlinear computational complexity with respect to the size of the search problem, rendering its application impractical in large spaces or in real-time systems where decisions must be made quickly. We study the amortization of this policy by training a neural network to learn to search. To circumvent the difficulty of learning from scratch, we appeal to imitation learning techniques to mimic the behavior of the expert, expensive-to-compute policy. Our policy network, trained on synthetic data, learns a beneficial search strategy that yields nonmyopic decisions carefully balancing exploration and exploitation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our policy achieves competitive performance at real-world tasks that closely approximates the expert's at a fraction of the cost, while outperforming cheaper baselines.
title Amortized nonmyopic active search via deep imitation learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15031