RBF kernel to increase pretraining data diversity. Architectural details In all experiments, we use the same ExPT architecture. This section details how we constructed new objectives from the original D'Kitty and Ant that we In Ant-Energy, the reward at each time step is: R =1+ Survival reward Control cost Contact cost, (6) which means we incentivize the robot to conserve energy instead of running fast. D'Kitty tasks In D'Kitty, the goal is to design a morphology that allows the D'Kitty robot to reach We found the approximate oracle provided by Design-Bench not accurate enough to provide a reliable comparison of optimization methods on this task. C.1 Effects of GP hyperparameters We empirically examine the impact of two GP hyperparameters, the variance and the length scale ` Specifically, we evaluate the performance of ExPT on D'Kitty We average the performance across 3 seeds.

In this work, we address the more challenging yet realistic setting of few-shot experimental design, where only a few labeled data points of input designs and their corresponding values are available.

RBF kernel to increase pretraining data diversity. Architectural details In all experiments, we use the same ExPT architecture. This section details how we constructed new objectives from the original D'Kitty and Ant that we In Ant-Energy, the reward at each time step is: R =1+ Survival reward Control cost Contact cost, (6) which means we incentivize the robot to conserve energy instead of running fast. D'Kitty tasks In D'Kitty, the goal is to design a morphology that allows the D'Kitty robot to reach We found the approximate oracle provided by Design-Bench not accurate enough to provide a reliable comparison of optimization methods on this task. C.1 Effects of GP hyperparameters We empirically examine the impact of two GP hyperparameters, the variance and the length scale ` Specifically, we evaluate the performance of ExPT on D'Kitty We average the performance across 3 seeds.

In this work, we address the more challenging yet realistic setting of few-shot experimental design, where only a few labeled data points of input designs and their corresponding values are available.

Experimental design is a fundamental problem in many science and engineering fields. In this problem, sample efficiency is crucial due to the time, money, and safety costs of real-world design evaluations. Existing approaches either rely on active data collection or access to large, labeled datasets of past experiments, making them impractical in many real-world scenarios. In this work, we address the more challenging yet realistic setting of few-shot experimental design, where only a few labeled data points of input designs and their corresponding values are available. We approach this problem as a conditional generation task, where a model conditions on a few labeled examples and the desired output to generate an optimal input design. To this end, we introduce Experiment Pretrained Transformers (ExPT), a foundation model for few-shot experimental design that employs a novel combination of synthetic pretraining with in-context learning. In ExPT, we only assume knowledge of a finite collection of unlabelled data points from the input domain and pretrain a transformer neural network to optimize diverse synthetic functions defined over this domain. Unsupervised pretraining allows ExPT to adapt to any design task at test time in an in-context fashion by conditioning on a few labeled data points from the target task and generating the candidate optima. We evaluate ExPT on few-shot experimental design in challenging domains and demonstrate its superior generality and performance compared to existing methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/tung-nd/ExPT.git.