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Robotic algorithms typically depend on various parameters, the choice of which significantly affects the robot's performance. While an initial guess for the parameters may be obtained from dynamic models of the robot, parameters are usually…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-04-08 Felix Berkenkamp , Andreas Krause , Angela P. Schoellig

This paper considers the use of a simple posterior sampling algorithm to balance between exploration and exploitation when learning to optimize actions such as in multi-armed bandit problems. The algorithm, also known as Thompson Sampling,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-04 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

In this work, we study Bayesian quantum parameter estimation given a finite number of uses of the process encoding one or more unknown physical quantities. For multiple uses, it is conventional to classify quantum metrological protocols as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-02-11 Erik L. André , Jessica Bavaresco , Mohammad Mehboudi

We study a class of adversarial bandit optimization problems in which the loss functions may be non-convex and non-smooth. In each round, the learner observes a loss that consists of an underlying linear component together with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Zhuoyu Cheng , Kohei Hatano , Eiji Takimoto

Bayesian optimization with Gaussian processes (GP) is commonly used to optimize black-box functions. The Mat\'ern and the Radial Basis Function (RBF) covariance functions are used frequently, but they do not make any assumptions about the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Huy Hoang Nguyen , Han Zhou , Matthew B. Blaschko , Aleksei Tiulpin

Achieving the full promise of the Thermodynamic Variational Objective (TVO), a recently proposed variational lower bound on the log evidence involving a one-dimensional Riemann integral approximation, requires choosing a "schedule" of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Vu Nguyen , Vaden Masrani , Rob Brekelmans , Michael A. Osborne , Frank Wood

Existing Bayesian Optimization (BO) methods typically balance exploration and exploitation to optimize costly objective functions. However, these methods often suffer from a significant one-step bias, which may lead to convergence towards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Ruiyao Miao , Junren Xiao , Shiya Tsang , Hui Xiong , Yingnian Wu

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient optimization algorithm widely employed across various applications. In some challenging BO tasks, input uncertainty arises due to the inevitable randomness in the optimization process, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Lin Yang , Junlong Lyu , Wenlong Lyu , Zhitang Chen

Due to their flexibility, Gaussian processes (GPs) have been widely used in nonparametric function estimation. A prior information about the underlying function is often available. For instance, the physical system (computer model output)…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-11-21 Hassan Maatouk

The Gaussian process (GP) model, which has been extensively applied as priors of functions, has demonstrated excellent performance. The specification of a large number of parameters affects the computational efficiency and the feasibility…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-13 Shisheng Cui , Chia-Jung Chang

Bayesian optimisation has proven to be a powerful tool for expensive global black-box optimisation problems. In this paper, we propose new Bayesian optimisation variants of the popular Knowledge Gradient acquisition functions for problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Xietao Wang Lin , Juan Ungredda , Max Butler , James Town , Alma Rahat , Hemant Singh , Juergen Branke

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is used to find the global optima of black box functions. In this work, we propose a practical BO method of function compositions where the form of the composition is known but the constituent functions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Kunal Jain , Prabuchandran K. J. , Tejas Bodas

Expected improvement (EI) is one of the most widely used acquisition functions in Bayesian optimization (BO). Despite its proven success in applications for decades, important open questions remain on the theoretical convergence behaviors…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-13 Jingyi Wang , Haowei Wang , Nai-Yuan Chiang , Cosmin G. Petra

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful paradigm for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Traditional BO methods typically rely on separate hand-crafted acquisition functions and surrogate models for the underlying function, and often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Fengxue Zhang , Yuxin Chen

We propose an efficient transfer Bayesian optimization method, which finds the maximum of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box function by using data on related optimization tasks. Our method uses auxiliary information that represents the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-18 Tomoharu Iwata , Takuma Otsuka

We study the problem of constrained efficient global optimization, where both the objective and constraints are expensive black-box functions that can be learned with Gaussian processes. We propose CONFIG (CONstrained efFIcient Global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-07 Wenjie Xu , Yuning Jiang , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Colin N. Jones

We study black-box vector optimization with Gaussian process bandits, where there is an incomplete order relation on objective vectors described by a polyhedral convex cone. Existing black-box vector optimization approaches either suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 İlter Onat Korkmaz , Yaşar Cahit Yıldırım , Çağın Ararat , Cem Tekin

Bayesian optimisation is a powerful tool to solve expensive black-box problems, but fails when the stationary assumption made on the objective function is strongly violated, which is the case in particular for ill-conditioned or…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-06 Victor Picheny , Sattar Vakili , Artem Artemev

We propose a new strategy for best-arm identification with fixed confidence of Gaussian variables with bounded means and unit variance. This strategy, called Exploration-Biased Sampling, is not only asymptotically optimal: it is to the best…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-08 Antoine Barrier , Aurélien Garivier , Tomáš Kocák

Gaussian processes (GPs) are a mature and widely-used component of the ML toolbox. One of their desirable qualities is automatic hyperparameter selection, which allows for training without user intervention. However, in many realistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Sebastian W. Ober , Artem Artemev , Marcel Wagenländer , Rudolfs Grobins , Mark van der Wilk