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Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular paradigm for global optimization of expensive black-box functions, but there are many domains where the function is not completely a black-box. The data may have some known structure (e.g. symmetries)…
We consider the problem of sequentially optimizing a time-varying objective function using time-varying Bayesian optimization (TVBO). Current approaches to TVBO require prior knowledge of a constant rate of change to cope with stale data…
High-dimensional Bayesian optimization (BO) tasks such as molecular design often require 10,000 function evaluations before obtaining meaningful results. While methods like sparse variational Gaussian processes (SVGPs) reduce computational…
We develop a general theory to optimize the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles. We propose a novel optimization…
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…
This paper investigates the challenges of optimal online policy learning under missing data. State-of-the-art algorithms implicitly assume that rewards are always observable. I show that when rewards are missing at random, the Upper…
This paper studies the problem of online performance optimization of constrained closed-loop control systems, where both the objective and the constraints are unknown black-box functions affected by exogenous time-varying contextual…
Most bandit algorithm designs are purely theoretical. Therefore, they have strong regret guarantees, but also are often too conservative in practice. In this work, we pioneer the idea of algorithm design by minimizing the empirical Bayes…
The standard theory of optimal stopping is based on the idealised assumption that the underlying process is essentially known. In this paper, we drop this restriction and study data-driven optimal stopping for a general diffusion process,…
We revisit the challenge of designing online algorithms for the bandit convex optimization problem (BCO) which are also scalable to high dimensional problems. Hence, we consider algorithms that are \textit{projection-free}, i.e., based on…
Bayesian optimization is an effective method for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. High-dimensional problems are particularly challenging as the surrogate model of the objective suffers from the curse of dimensionality,…
Bayesian optimisation (BO) algorithms have shown remarkable success in applications involving expensive black-box functions. Traditionally BO has been set as a sequential decision-making process which estimates the utility of query points…
This paper studies the online optimal control problem with time-varying convex stage costs for a time-invariant linear dynamical system, where a finite lookahead window of accurate predictions of the stage costs are available at each time.…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a powerful method for optimizing black-box functions by combining prior knowledge with ongoing function evaluations. BO constructs a probabilistic surrogate model of the objective function given the covariates,…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach for sample-efficient optimization of black-box objective functions. While BO has been successfully applied to a wide range of scientific applications, traditional approaches to…
Black-Box Optimization (BBO) has found successful applications in many fields of science and engineering. Recently, there has been a growing interest in meta-learning particular components of BBO algorithms to speed up optimization and get…
We provide improved gap-dependent regret bounds for reinforcement learning in finite episodic Markov decision processes. Compared to prior work, our bounds depend on alternative definitions of gaps. These definitions are based on the…
We aim to optimize a black-box function $f:\mathcal{X} \mapsto \mathbb{R}$ under the assumption that $f$ is H\"older smooth and has bounded norm in the RKHS associated with a given kernel $K$. This problem is known to have an agnostic…
Bayesian optimization (BO) selects evaluation points for expensive black-box objectives using Gaussian process (GP) predictive distributions. Kernel choice and hyperparameter selection can lead to miscalibrated predictive distributions and…
Bayesian optimisation has gained great popularity as a tool for optimising the parameters of machine learning algorithms and models. Somewhat ironically, setting up the hyper-parameters of Bayesian optimisation methods is notoriously hard.…