Guided Trajectory Generation with Diffusion Models for Offline Model-based Optimization

Optimizing complex and high-dimensional black-box functions is ubiquitous in science and engineering fields. Unfortunately, the online evaluation of these functions is restricted due to time and safety constraints in most cases. In offline model-based optimization (MBO), we aim to find a design that maximizes the target function using only a pre-existing offline dataset. While prior methods consider forward or inverse approaches to address the problem, these approaches are limited by conservatism and the difficulty of learning highly multi-modal mappings. Recently, there has been an emerging paradigm of learning to improve solutions with synthetic trajectories constructed from the offline dataset.