PABBO: Preferential Amortized Black-Box Optimization

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A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa

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en

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25

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13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, pp. 98689-98713

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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 process, and an acquisition strategy to select the next candidate pair to get user feedback on. Due to the non-conjugacy of the associated likelihood, every PBO step requires a significant amount of computations with various approximate inference techniques. This computational overhead is incompatible with the way humans interact with computers, hindering the use of PBO in real-world cases. Building on the recent advances of amortized BO, we propose to circumvent this issue by fully amortizing PBO, meta-learning both the surrogate and the acquisition function. Our method comprises a novel transformer neural process architecture, trained using reinforcement learning and tailored auxiliary losses. On a benchmark composed of synthetic and real-world datasets, our method is several orders of magnitude faster than the usual Gaussian process-based strategies and often outperforms them in accuracy.

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Publisher Copyright: © 2025 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025. All rights reserved.

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Zhang, X, Huang, D, Kaski, S & Martinelli, J 2025, PABBO: Preferential Amortized Black-Box Optimization. in 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025. Curran Associates Inc., pp. 98689-98713, International Conference on Learning Representations, Singapore, Singapore, 24/04/2025. < https://openreview.net/forum?id=YhfrKB3Ah7 >