How Useful is Intermittent, Asynchronous Expert Feedback for Bayesian Optimization?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kristiadi, Agustinus, Strieth-Kalthoff, Felix, Subramanian, Sriram Ganapathi, Fortuin, Vincent, Poupart, Pascal, Pleiss, Geoff
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Kristiadi, Agustinus
Strieth-Kalthoff, Felix
Subramanian, Sriram Ganapathi
Fortuin, Vincent
Poupart, Pascal
Pleiss, Geoff
author_facet Kristiadi, Agustinus
Strieth-Kalthoff, Felix
Subramanian, Sriram Ganapathi
Fortuin, Vincent
Poupart, Pascal
Pleiss, Geoff
contents Bayesian optimization (BO) is an integral part of automated scientific discovery -- the so-called self-driving lab -- where human inputs are ideally minimal or at least non-blocking. However, scientists often have strong intuition, and thus human feedback is still useful. Nevertheless, prior works in enhancing BO with expert feedback, such as by incorporating it in an offline or online but blocking (arrives at each BO iteration) manner, are incompatible with the spirit of self-driving labs. In this work, we study whether a small amount of randomly arriving expert feedback that is being incorporated in a non-blocking manner can improve a BO campaign. To this end, we run an additional, independent computing thread on top of the BO loop to handle the feedback-gathering process. The gathered feedback is used to learn a Bayesian preference model that can readily be incorporated into the BO thread, to steer its exploration-exploitation process. Experiments on toy and chemistry datasets suggest that even just a few intermittent, asynchronous expert feedback can be useful for improving or constraining BO. This can especially be useful for its implication in improving self-driving labs, e.g. making them more data-efficient and less costly.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_06459
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Useful is Intermittent, Asynchronous Expert Feedback for Bayesian Optimization?
Kristiadi, Agustinus
Strieth-Kalthoff, Felix
Subramanian, Sriram Ganapathi
Fortuin, Vincent
Poupart, Pascal
Pleiss, Geoff
Machine Learning
Bayesian optimization (BO) is an integral part of automated scientific discovery -- the so-called self-driving lab -- where human inputs are ideally minimal or at least non-blocking. However, scientists often have strong intuition, and thus human feedback is still useful. Nevertheless, prior works in enhancing BO with expert feedback, such as by incorporating it in an offline or online but blocking (arrives at each BO iteration) manner, are incompatible with the spirit of self-driving labs. In this work, we study whether a small amount of randomly arriving expert feedback that is being incorporated in a non-blocking manner can improve a BO campaign. To this end, we run an additional, independent computing thread on top of the BO loop to handle the feedback-gathering process. The gathered feedback is used to learn a Bayesian preference model that can readily be incorporated into the BO thread, to steer its exploration-exploitation process. Experiments on toy and chemistry datasets suggest that even just a few intermittent, asynchronous expert feedback can be useful for improving or constraining BO. This can especially be useful for its implication in improving self-driving labs, e.g. making them more data-efficient and less costly.
title How Useful is Intermittent, Asynchronous Expert Feedback for Bayesian Optimization?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06459