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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Artur Souza , Luigi Nardi , Leonardo B. Oliveira , Kunle Olukotun , Marius Lindauer , Frank Hutter

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box objective functions. An important challenge in BO is its application to high-dimensional search spaces due in large part to the curse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Wei-Ting Tang , Joel A. Paulson

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-05 Willie Neiswanger , Kirthevasan Kandasamy , Barnabas Poczos , Jeff Schneider , Eric Xing

Preferential Bayesian Optimization (PBO) is a sample-efficient method to learn latent user utilities from preferential feedback over a pair of designs. It relies on a statistical surrogate model for the latent function, usually a Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-04 Xinyu Zhang , Daolang Huang , Samuel Kaski , Julien Martinelli

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely-used sequential method for zeroth-order optimization of complex and expensive-to-compute black-box functions. The existing BO methods assume that the function evaluation (feedback) is available to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Arun Verma , Zhongxiang Dai , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Black-box optimization (BBO) can be used to optimize functions whose analytic form is unknown. A common approach to realising BBO is to learn a surrogate model which approximates the target black-box function which can then be solved via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Jonas Nüßlein , Christoph Roch , Thomas Gabor , Jonas Stein , Claudia Linnhoff-Popien , Sebastian Feld

Bayesian optimization (BO) has been widely used to optimize expensive and black-box functions across various domains. However, existing BO methods have not addressed tensor-output functions. To fill this gap, we propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jingru Huang , Haijie Xu , Jie Guo , Manrui Jiang , Chen Zhang

Because of its sample efficiency, Bayesian optimization (BO) has become a popular approach dealing with expensive black-box optimization problems, such as hyperparameter optimization (HPO). Recent empirical experiments showed that the loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Difan Deng , Marius Lindauer

Interest in derivative-free optimization (DFO) and "evolutionary strategies" (ES) has recently surged in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) community, with growing evidence that they can match state of the art methods for policy optimization…

Bayesian optimization (BO) has for sequential optimization of expensive black-box functions demonstrated practicality and effectiveness in many real-world settings. Meta-Bayesian optimization (meta-BO) focuses on improving the sample…

This research reports on the recent development of a black-box optimization method based on single-step deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and on its conceptual proximity to evolution strategy (ES) techniques. In the fashion of policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-29 Jonathan Viquerat , Régis Duvigneau , Philippe Meliga , Alexander Kuhnle , Elie Hachem

Most research in Bayesian optimization (BO) has focused on \emph{direct feedback} scenarios, where one has access to exact values of some expensive-to-evaluate objective. This direction has been mainly driven by the use of BO in machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-02 Eero Siivola , Akash Kumar Dhaka , Michael Riis Andersen , Javier Gonzalez , Pablo Garcia Moreno , Aki Vehtari

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a class of black-box, surrogate-based heuristics that can efficiently optimize problems that are expensive to evaluate, and hence admit only small evaluation budgets. BO is particularly popular for solving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Maria Laura Santoni , Elena Raponi , Renato De Leone , Carola Doerr

Recent advances have extended the scope of Bayesian optimization (BO) to expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions with dozens of dimensions, aspiring to unlock impactful applications, for example, in the life sciences, neural architecture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Leonard Papenmeier , Luigi Nardi , Matthias Poloczek

Bayesian optimization (BO) with Gaussian processes (GP) has become an indispensable algorithm for black box optimization problems. Not without a dash of irony, BO is often considered a black box itself, lacking ways to provide reasons as to…

We consider Bayesian optimization of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box objective function, where we also have access to cheaper approximations of the objective. In general, such approximations arise in applications such as reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-16 Matthias Poloczek , Jialei Wang , Peter I. Frazier

Bayesian optimization (BO) methods are useful for optimizing functions that are expensive to evaluate, lack an analytical expression and whose evaluations can be contaminated by noise. These methods rely on a probabilistic model of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-04 Eduardo C. Garrido-Merchán , Daniel Hernández-Lobato

It is commonly believed that Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithms are highly efficient for optimizing numerically costly functions. However, BO is not often compared to widely different alternatives, and is mostly tested on narrow sets of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-01 Rodolphe Le Riche , Victor Picheny

Optimizing expensive black-box objectives over mixed search spaces is a common challenge across the natural sciences. Bayesian optimization (BO) offers sample-efficient strategies through probabilistic surrogate models and acquisition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Yuhao Zhang , Ti John , Matthias Stosiek , Patrick Rinke

Bayesian optimization is a data-efficient technique that has been shown to be extremely powerful to optimize expensive, black-box, and possibly noisy objective functions. Many applications involve optimizing probabilities and mixtures which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Federico Pavesi , Antonio Candelieri , Noémie Jaquier