English

Convergence Rates of Constrained Expected Improvement

Machine Learning 2026-01-13 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Constrained Bayesian optimization (CBO) methods have seen significant success in black-box optimization with constraints. One of the most commonly used CBO methods is the constrained expected improvement (CEI) algorithm. CEI is a natural extension of expected improvement (EI) when constraints are incorporated. However, the theoretical convergence rate of CEI has not been established. In this work, we study the convergence rate of CEI by analyzing its simple regret upper bound. First, we show that when the objective function ff and constraint function cc are assumed to each lie in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), CEI achieves the convergence rates of O(t12logd+12(t)) and  O(tν2ν+dlogν2ν+d(t))\mathcal{O} \left(t^{-\frac{1}{2}}\log^{\frac{d+1}{2}}(t) \right) \ \text{and }\ \mathcal{O}\left(t^{\frac{-\nu}{2\nu+d}} \log^{\frac{\nu}{2\nu+d}}(t)\right) for the commonly used squared exponential and Mat\'{e}rn kernels (ν>12\nu>\frac{1}{2}), respectively. Second, we show that when ff is assumed to be sampled from Gaussian processes (GPs), CEI achieves similar convergence rates with a high probability. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the theoretical analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.11323,
  title  = {Convergence Rates of Constrained Expected Improvement},
  author = {Haowei Wang and Jingyi Wang and Zhongxiang Dai and Nai-Yuan Chiang and Szu Hui Ng and Cosmin G. Petra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.11323},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:36:10.251Z