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Related papers: LLM Based Bayesian Optimization for Prompt Search

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This paper presents a novel approach to top-$k$ ranking Bayesian optimization (top-$k$ ranking BO) which is a practical and significant generalization of preferential BO to handle top-$k$ ranking and tie/indifference observations. We first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Quoc Phong Nguyen , Sebastian Tay , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low , Patrick Jaillet

Prompt engineering has proven to be a crucial step in leveraging pretrained large language models (LLMs) in solving various real-world tasks. Numerous solutions have been proposed that seek to automate prompt engineering by using the model…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely-used method for optimizing expensive (to evaluate) problems. At the core of most BO methods is the modeling of the objective function using a Gaussian Process (GP) whose covariance is selected from a…

Bayesian Optimization (BO), guided by Gaussian process (GP) surrogates, has proven to be an invaluable technique for efficient, high-dimensional, black-box optimization, a critical problem inherent to many applications such as industrial…

The advent of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has attracted considerable attention in various domains due to their remarkable performance and versatility. As the use of these models continues to grow, the importance of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Jill Baumann , Oliver Kramer

Machine learning algorithms frequently require careful tuning of model hyperparameters, regularization terms, and optimization parameters. Unfortunately, this tuning is often a "black art" that requires expert experience, unwritten rules of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-08-30 Jasper Snoek , Hugo Larochelle , Ryan P. Adams

An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critical for controlling model outputs. While recent Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 MohammadReza Davari , Utkarsh Garg , Weixin Cai , Eugene Belilovsky

To ensure that large language model (LLM) responses are helpful and non-toxic, a reward model trained on human preference data is usually used. LLM responses with high rewards are then selected through best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling or the LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Adam X. Yang , Maxime Robeyns , Thomas Coste , Zhengyan Shi , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Laurence Aitchison

Optimization of LLM training and inference configurations, such as hyperparameters, data mixtures, and prompts, is critical to performance, but it is often approached heuristically in practice, leading to potentially suboptimal outcomes. By…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ruth Wan Theng Chew , Zhiliang Chen , Apivich Hemachandra , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Bayesian optimization (BO) has established itself as a leading strategy for efficiently optimizing expensive-to-evaluate functions. Existing BO methods mostly rely on Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models and are not applicable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-29 Yongsheng Mei , Mahdi Imani , Tian Lan

Parameter settings profoundly impact the performance of machine learning algorithms and laboratory experiments. The classical grid search or trial-error methods are exponentially expensive in large parameter spaces, and Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Vu Nguyen , Santu Rana , Sunil Gupta , Cheng Li , Svetha Venkatesh

This study introduces SLLMBO, an innovative framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) for hyperparameter optimization (HPO), incorporating dynamic search space adaptability, enhanced parameter space exploitation, and a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-06 Kanan Mahammadli , Seyda Ertekin

Bayesian optimisation (BO) is a well-known efficient algorithm for finding the global optimum of expensive, black-box functions. The current practical BO algorithms have regret bounds ranging from $\mathcal{O}(\frac{logN}{\sqrt{N}})$ to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Hung Tran-The , Sunil Gupta , Santu Rana , Svetha Venkatesh

Bayesian optimization (BO) has become popular for sequential optimization of black-box functions. When BO is used to optimize a target function, we often have access to previous evaluations of potentially related functions. This begs the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Zhongxiang Dai , Yizhou Chen , Haibin Yu , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low , Patrick Jaillet

This article develops a Bayesian optimization (BO) method which acts directly over raw strings, proposing the first uses of string kernels and genetic algorithms within BO loops. Recent applications of BO over strings have been hindered by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-05 Henry B. Moss , Daniel Beck , Javier Gonzalez , David S. Leslie , Paul Rayson

Prompt engineering plays a critical role in adapting large language models (LLMs) to complex reasoning and labeling tasks without the need for extensive fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt optimization pipeline for frame…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Do Minh Duc , Quan Xuan Truong , Nguyen Tat Dat , Nguyen Van Vinh

High-quality prompts are crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve exceptional performance. However, manually crafting effective prompts is labor-intensive and demands significant domain expertise, limiting its scalability.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Zheng Dong , Luming Shang , Gabriela Olinto

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been proposed as general-purpose agents for experimental design, with claims that they can perform in-context experimental design. We evaluate this hypothesis using both open- and closed-source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Rushil Gupta , Jason Hartford , Bang Liu

First Order Bayesian Optimization (FOBO) is a sample efficient sequential approach to find the global maxima of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box objective function by suitably querying for the function and its gradient evaluations. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Utkarsh Prakash , Aryan Chollera , Kushagra Khatwani , Prabuchandran K. J. , Tejas Bodas

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach to optimize expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. A significant challenge in BO is to scale to high-dimensional parameter spaces while retaining sample efficiency. A solution considered…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-26 Benjamin Letham , Roberto Calandra , Akshara Rai , Eytan Bakshy