Our regret bound generalizes that of GP-UCB [38] which always selects all variables, aswellasthatofDropout [21]whichselectsdvariables randomly ineachiteration.

Despite the recent success of Bayesian optimization (BO) in a variety of applications where sample efficiency is imperative, its performance may be seriously compromised in settings characterized by high-dimensional parameter spaces. A solution to preserve the sample efficiency of BO in such problems is to introduce domain knowledge into its formulation. In this paper, we propose to exploit the geometry of non-Euclidean search spaces, which often arise in a variety of domains, to learn structure-preserving mappings and optimize the acquisition function of BO in low-dimensional latent spaces. Our approach, built on Riemannian manifolds theory, features geometry-aware Gaussian processes that jointly learn a nested-manifolds embedding and a representation of the objective function in the latent space. We test our approach in several benchmark artificial landscapes and report that it not only outperforms other high-dimensional BO approaches in several settings, but consistently optimizes the objective functions, as opposed to geometry-unaware BO methods.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach to optimize expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. A significant challenge in BO is to scale to high-dimensional parameter spaces while retaining sample efficiency. A solution considered in existing literature is to embed the high-dimensional space in a lower-dimensional manifold, often via a random linear embedding. In this paper, we identify several crucial issues and misconceptions about the use of linear embeddings for BO. We study the properties of linear embeddings from the literature and show that some of the design choices in current approaches adversely impact their performance. We show empirically that properly addressing these issues significantly improves the efficacy of linear embeddings for BO on a range of problems, including learning a gait policy for robot locomotion.

The exponential and logarithmic maps related to hypersphere manifolds can be found, e.g., in [

Optimizing discrete black-box functions is key in several domains, e.g. protein engineering and drug design. Due to the lack of gradient information and the need for sample efficiency, Bayesian optimization is an ideal candidate for these tasks. Several methods for high-dimensional continuous and categorical Bayesian optimization have been proposed recently. However, our survey of the field reveals highly heterogeneous experimental set-ups across methods and technical barriers for the replicability and application of published algorithms to real-world tasks. To address these issues, we develop a unified framework to test a vast array of high-dimensional Bayesian optimization methods and a collection of standardized black-box functions representing real-world application domains in chemistry and biology.

Recent work reported that simple Bayesian optimization methods perform well for high-dimensional real-world tasks, seemingly contradicting prior work and tribal knowledge. This paper investigates the 'why'. We identify fundamental challenges that arise in high-dimensional Bayesian optimization and explain why recent methods succeed. Our analysis shows that vanishing gradients caused by Gaussian process initialization schemes play a major role in the failures of high-dimensional Bayesian optimization and that methods that promote local search behaviors are better suited for the task. We find that maximum likelihood estimation of Gaussian process length scales suffices for state-of-the-art performance. Based on this, we propose a simple variant of maximum likelihood estimation called MSR that leverages these findings to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a comprehensive set of real-world applications. We also present targeted experiments to illustrate and confirm our findings.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is one of the most powerful strategies to solve computationally expensive-to-evaluate blackbox optimization problems. However, BO methods are conventionally used for optimization problems of small dimension because of the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, a high-dimensionnal optimization method incorporating linear embedding subspaces of small dimension is proposed to efficiently perform the optimization. An adaptive learning strategy for these linear embeddings is carried out in conjunction with the optimization. The resulting BO method, named efficient global optimization coupled with random and supervised embedding (EGORSE), combines in an adaptive way both random and supervised linear embeddings. EGORSE has been compared to state-of-the-art algorithms and tested on academic examples with a number of design variables ranging from 10 to 600. The obtained results show the high potential of EGORSE to solve high-dimensional blackbox optimization problems, in terms of both CPU time and the limited number of calls to the expensive blackbox simulation.

Additional Feedback: I think this is a good paper that will inform future work on high-dimensional BO. Having highlighted a number of severe shortcomings of linear embeddings, I expect future work to either leverage the insights of ALEBO to develop a truly competitive baseline, or simply use these lessons learned to focus on different methods, such as the model-free ones. The robot locomotion experiment does suggest that linear embeddings, despite all improvements, are still not suited to be the default for high dimensional BO. Not only are they outperformed by model-free methods, such as CMA-ES, but also by some model-based ones such as TuRBO (despite the larger variance, as shown in the appendix). In any case, while we do not have a new state of the art method for high-dimensional BO out of this paper, the contribution is useful and will inform future work in this space.

Despite the recent success of Bayesian optimization (BO) in a variety of applications where sample efficiency is imperative, its performance may be seriously compromised in settings characterized by high-dimensional parameter spaces. A solution to preserve the sample efficiency of BO in such problems is to introduce domain knowledge into its formulation. In this paper, we propose to exploit the geometry of non-Euclidean search spaces, which often arise in a variety of domains, to learn structure-preserving mappings and optimize the acquisition function of BO in low-dimensional latent spaces. Our approach, built on Riemannian manifolds theory, features geometry-aware Gaussian processes that jointly learn a nested-manifolds embedding and a representation of the objective function in the latent space. We test our approach in several benchmark artificial landscapes and report that it not only outperforms other high-dimensional BO approaches in several settings, but consistently optimizes the objective functions, as opposed to geometry-unaware BO methods.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach to optimize expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. A significant challenge in BO is to scale to high-dimensional parameter spaces while retaining sample efficiency. A solution considered in existing literature is to embed the high-dimensional space in a lower-dimensional manifold, often via a random linear embedding. In this paper, we identify several crucial issues and misconceptions about the use of linear embeddings for BO. We study the properties of linear embeddings from the literature and show that some of the design choices in current approaches adversely impact their performance.