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Offline preference optimization methods are efficient for large language models (LLMs) alignment. Direct Preference optimization (DPO)-like learning, one of the most popular approaches, stands out for its efficiency in reward modeling.…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a principled approach to molecular design tasks. In this paper we explain three pitfalls of BO which can cause poor empirical performance: an incorrect prior width, over-smoothing, and inadequate acquisition…
Learning robot controllers by minimizing a black-box objective cost using Bayesian optimization (BO) can be time-consuming and challenging. It is very often the case that some roll-outs result in failure behaviors, causing premature…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is increasingly employed in critical applications such as materials design and drug discovery. An increasingly popular strategy in BO is to forgo the sole reliance on high-fidelity data and instead use an ensemble…
Optimization is becoming increasingly common in scientific and engineering domains. Oftentimes, these problems involve various levels of stochasticity or uncertainty in generating proposed solutions. Therefore, optimization in these…
We analyze the problem of learning a single user's preferences in an active learning setting, sequentially and adaptively querying the user over a finite time horizon. Learning is conducted via choice-based queries, where the user selects…
In this work we rigorously analyse assumptions inherent to black-box optimisation hyper-parameter tuning tasks. Our results on the Bayesmark benchmark indicate that heteroscedasticity and non-stationarity pose significant challenges for…
While Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a very popular method for optimizing expensive black-box functions, it fails to leverage the experience of domain experts. This causes BO to waste function evaluations on bad design choices (e.g., machine…
In many high-throughput experimental design settings, such as those common in biochemical engineering, batched queries are more cost effective than one-by-one sequential queries. Furthermore, it is often not possible to directly choose…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach for expensive black-box optimization, with applications including parameter tuning, experimental design, robotics. BO usually models the objective function by a Gaussian process (GP), and…
A trade-off exists between reconstruction quality and the prior regularisation in the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) loss that Variational Autoencoder (VAE) models use for learning. There are few satisfactory approaches to deal with a balance…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful approach to sample-efficient optimization of black-box objective functions. However, the application of BO to areas such as recommendation systems often requires taking the interpretability and…
Optimizing an expensive-to-query function is a common task in science and engineering, where it is beneficial to keep the number of queries to a minimum. A popular strategy is Bayesian optimization (BO), which leverages probabilistic models…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is an attractive machine learning framework for performing sample-efficient global optimization of black-box functions. The optimization process is guided by an acquisition function that selects points to acquire…
Bayesian optimization is an approach to optimizing objective functions that take a long time (minutes or hours) to evaluate. It is best-suited for optimization over continuous domains of less than 20 dimensions, and tolerates stochastic…
This paper considers Bayesian optimization (BO) for problems with known outer problem structure. In contrast to the classic BO setting, where the objective function itself is unknown and needs to be iteratively estimated from noisy…
Datasets in engineering applications are often limited and contaminated, mainly due to unavoidable measurement noise and signal distortion. Thus, using conventional data-driven approaches to build a reliable discriminative model, and…
Variational Autoencoder based Bayesian Optimization (VAE-BO) has demonstrated its excellent performance in addressing high-dimensional structured optimization problems. However, current mainstream methods overlook the potential of utilizing…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient method and has been widely used for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Recently, there has been a considerable interest in BO literature in optimizing functions that are affected by…
Recent advancements have established Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a pivotal paradigm for aligning generative models with human intent. However, group-based optimization frameworks (e.g., GRPO) face a critical limitation: the rapid decay…