Local Preferential Bayesian Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Menn, Johanna, Kober, Miriam, Brunzema, Paul, Stenger, David, Trimpe, Sebastian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Menn, Johanna
Kober, Miriam
Brunzema, Paul
Stenger, David
Trimpe, Sebastian
author_facet Menn, Johanna
Kober, Miriam
Brunzema, Paul
Stenger, David
Trimpe, Sebastian
contents Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular and effective approach for tuning expensive, noisy experiments, but requires the formulation of an explicit objective function. Preferential BO (PBO) removes this requirement by learning from pairwise human feedback, yet existing methods struggle to efficiently optimize beyond low- and medium-dimensional problems due to their global search approaches. We address this limitation by developing a family of local PBO methods that transfer key ideas from high-dimensional BO to the preferential setting. In particular, we introduce local PBO methods which adapt trust-region and derivative-informed local search to pairwise preference feedback, where the latter exploits first- and second-order derivatives of the Laplace-approximated GP posterior. Our benchmark on GP sample paths, standard optimization benchmark functions, and policy-search tasks shows that local PBO methods are especially effective in high-dimensional and complex landscapes with steep optima. Compared with global preference-based baselines, they can substantially reduce cumulative regret, making them particularly useful for real-world preference-based optimization tasks such as policy search.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_02351
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Local Preferential Bayesian Optimization
Menn, Johanna
Kober, Miriam
Brunzema, Paul
Stenger, David
Trimpe, Sebastian
Machine Learning
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular and effective approach for tuning expensive, noisy experiments, but requires the formulation of an explicit objective function. Preferential BO (PBO) removes this requirement by learning from pairwise human feedback, yet existing methods struggle to efficiently optimize beyond low- and medium-dimensional problems due to their global search approaches. We address this limitation by developing a family of local PBO methods that transfer key ideas from high-dimensional BO to the preferential setting. In particular, we introduce local PBO methods which adapt trust-region and derivative-informed local search to pairwise preference feedback, where the latter exploits first- and second-order derivatives of the Laplace-approximated GP posterior. Our benchmark on GP sample paths, standard optimization benchmark functions, and policy-search tasks shows that local PBO methods are especially effective in high-dimensional and complex landscapes with steep optima. Compared with global preference-based baselines, they can substantially reduce cumulative regret, making them particularly useful for real-world preference-based optimization tasks such as policy search.
title Local Preferential Bayesian Optimization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02351