No Arabic abstract
Many applications require a learner to make sequential decisions given uncertainty regarding both the systems payoff function and safety constraints. In safety-critical systems, it is paramount that the learners actions do not violate the safety constraints at any stage of the learning process. In this paper, we study a stochastic bandit optimization problem where the unknown payoff and constraint functions are sampled from Gaussian Processes (GPs) first considered in [Srinivas et al., 2010]. We develop a safe variant of GP-UCB called SGP-UCB, with necessary modifications to respect safety constraints at every round. The algorithm has two distinct phases. The first phase seeks to estimate the set of safe actions in the decision set, while the second phase follows the GP-UCB decision rule. Our main contribution is to derive the first sub-linear regret bounds for this problem. We numerically compare SGP-UCB against existing safe Bayesian GP optimization algorithms.
This paper analyses the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits with deterministic observations. The analysis uses a branch and bound algorithm that is related to the UCB algorithm of (Srinivas et al., 2010). For GPs with Gaussian observation noise, with variance strictly greater than zero, (Srinivas et al., 2010) proved that the regret vanishes at the approximate rate of $O(frac{1}{sqrt{t}})$, where t is the number of observations. To complement their result, we attack the deterministic case and attain a much faster exponential convergence rate. Under some regularity assumptions, we show that the regret decreases asymptotically according to $O(e^{-frac{tau t}{(ln t)^{d/4}}})$ with high probability. Here, d is the dimension of the search space and $tau$ is a constant that depends on the behaviour of the objective function near its global maximum.
This paper analyzes the problem of Gaussian process (GP) bandits with deterministic observations. The analysis uses a branch and bound algorithm that is related to the UCB algorithm of (Srinivas et al, 2010). For GPs with Gaussian observation noise, with variance strictly greater than zero, Srinivas et al proved that the regret vanishes at the approximate rate of $O(1/sqrt{t})$, where t is the number of observations. To complement their result, we attack the deterministic case and attain a much faster exponential convergence rate. Under some regularity assumptions, we show that the regret decreases asymptotically according to $O(e^{-frac{tau t}{(ln t)^{d/4}}})$ with high probability. Here, d is the dimension of the search space and tau is a constant that depends on the behaviour of the objective function near its global maximum.
In this work, we investigate black-box optimization from the perspective of frequentist kernel methods. We propose a novel batch optimization algorithm, which jointly maximizes the acquisition function and select points from a whole batch in a holistic way. Theoretically, we derive regret bounds for both the noise-free and perturbation settings irrespective of the choice of kernel. Moreover, we analyze the property of the adversarial regret that is required by a robust initialization for Bayesian Optimization (BO). We prove that the adversarial regret bounds decrease with the decrease of covering radius, which provides a criterion for generating a point set to minimize the bound. We then propose fast searching algorithms to generate a point set with a small covering radius for the robust initialization. Experimental results on both synthetic benchmark problems and real-world problems show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
We study regret minimization in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting and establish a fundamental trade-off between the regret suffered under an algorithm, and its statistical robustness. Considering broad classes of underlying arms distributions, we show that bandit learning algorithms with logarithmic regret are always inconsistent and that consistent learning algorithms always suffer a super-logarithmic regret. This result highlights the inevitable statistical fragility of all `logarithmic regret bandit algorithms available in the literature---for instance, if a UCB algorithm designed for $sigma$-subGaussian distributions is used in a subGaussian setting with a mismatched variance parameter, the learning performance could be inconsistent. Next, we show a positive result: statistically robust and consistent learning performance is attainable if we allow the regret to be slightly worse than logarithmic. Specifically, we propose three classes of distribution oblivious algorithms that achieve an asymptotic regret that is arbitrarily close to logarithmic.
We consider multi-objective optimization (MOO) of an unknown vector-valued function in the non-parametric Bayesian optimization (BO) setting, with the aim being to learn points on the Pareto front of the objectives. Most existing BO algorithms do not model the fact that the multiple objectives, or equivalently, tasks can share similarities, and even the few that do lack rigorous, finite-time regret guarantees that capture explicitly inter-task structure. In this work, we address this problem by modelling inter-task dependencies using a multi-task kernel and develop two novel BO algorithms based on random scalarizations of the objectives. Our algorithms employ vector-valued kernel regression as a stepping stone and belong to the upper confidence bound class of algorithms. Under a smoothness assumption that the unknown vector-valued function is an element of the reproducing kernel Hilbert space associated with the multi-task kernel, we derive worst-case regret bounds for our algorithms that explicitly capture the similarities between tasks. We numerically benchmark our algorithms on both synthetic and real-life MOO problems, and show the advantages offered by learning with multi-task kernels.