Increasing the Scope as You Learn: Adaptive Bayesian Optimization in Nested Subspaces

Papenmeier, Leonard; Nardi, Luigi; Poloczek, Matthias

Abstract

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 search, and robotics. However, a closer examination reveals that the state-of-the-art methods for high-dimensional Bayesian optimization (HDBO) suffer from degrading performance as the number of dimensions increases, or even risk failure if certain unverifiable assumptions are not met. This paper proposes BAxUS that leverages a novel family of nested random subspaces to adapt the space it optimizes over to the problem. This ensures high performance while removing the risk of failure, which we assert via theoretical guarantees. A comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that BAxUS achieves better results than the state-of-the-art methods for a broad set of applications.

Keywords

Bayesian Optimization

Cite as

Papenmeier, L., Nardi, L., & Poloczek, M. (2022). Increasing the Scope as You Learn: Adaptive Bayesian Optimization in Nested Subspaces. In Koyejo, S., Mohamed, S., Agarwal, A., Belgrave, D., Cho, K., & Oh, A. (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) (-, pp. 11586–11601). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems: Vol. 35. Red Hook, NY, United States: Curran Associates.

Details

Publication type
Research article in proceedings (conference)

Peer reviewed
Yes

Publication status
Published

Year
2022

Conference
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35, NeurIPS 2022

Venue
New Orleans Convention Center

Volume
35

Book title
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022)

Editor
Koyejo, S.; Mohamed, S.; Agarwal, A.; Belgrave, D.; Cho, K.; Oh, A.

Start page
11586

End page
11601

Edition
-

Volume
35

Title of series
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems

Publisher
Curran Associates

Place
Red Hook, NY, United States

Language
English

ISSN
1049-5258

ISBN
9781713871088

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