arXiv Machine Learning

Bayesian Optimization with Rich Auxiliary Information via LLMs

The paper introduces Bayesian Optimization (BO) techniques that incorporate rich auxiliary information—such as training curves, expert notes, images, and prior knowledge—using large language models (LLMs). Three new methods are proposed to integrate this auxiliary data into BO, and they are evaluated on hyperparameter optimization benchmarks and a real-world nuclear fusion task. The results show that these LLM-enhanced BO methods consistently outperform standard BO and existing LLM-based optimization approaches.

arXiv AI
Aug 6

Out-Of-The-Loop Multi-Fidelity Bayesian Optimization

arXiv:2608. 04113v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Black-box optimization is a ubiquitous problem in science and engineering, often dealing with expensive objective functions with cheaper lower-fidelity proxies available.

By Gustavo Sutter, Hao Wang, Luis Ricardez-Sandoval, Pascal Poupart, Agustinus Kristiadi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

GRAPE: Gradient Refinement and Progress-Aware Exploitation for Query-Efficient High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization

GRAPE is a two‑stage Bayesian optimization framework that first refines the local gradient posterior using a closed‑form acquisition function and then selects update directions by maximizing expected decrease conditioned on descent. The authors prove that the refinement stage monotonically reduces local uncertainty and that the progress‑aware direction converges to true steepest descent as the posterior sharpens. Empirical results show GRAPE achieves a 5.4× speedup on black‑box adversarial attacks and reduces final average regret by 3.8 log‑units on large language model prompt‑optimization tasks.

By Richard Cornelius Suwandi, Feng Yin
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Automated Computational Energy Minimization of ML Algorithms using Constrained Bayesian Optimization

The paper presents a method that uses Constrained Bayesian Optimization (CBO) to minimize the energy consumption of machine learning models while ensuring their generalization performance stays above a specified threshold. By treating energy usage as the primary objective and performance as a constraint, the authors demonstrate that CBO can reduce training energy costs on both regression and classification tasks without sacrificing predictive accuracy.

By Pallavi Mitra, Felix Biessmann
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Efficiently Estimating Optimal Hyperparameter Scaling Laws through Power-Law Entropy Search

The paper introduces Power‑Law Entropy Search (PLES), a computational‑cost‑aware acquisition function that uses multi‑fidelity Bayesian optimization to efficiently estimate optimal hyperparameter scaling laws for large language model training. PLES focuses on reducing the overall uncertainty of scaling law estimates rather than optimizing a single objective, selecting configurations that maximize uncertainty reduction per unit computational cost. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, surrogate models, and real LLM pre‑training runs show that PLES converges to accurate scaling laws using less than one‑tenth of the computational budget required by conventional grid search and other baselines.

By Zhiliang Chen, Sebastian Ament, David Eriksson, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy, Jihao Andreas Lin