Decentralized High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization with Factor Graphs
Published in 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2018
Abstract: This paper presents a novel decentralized high-dimensional Bayesian optimization (DEC-HBO) algorithm that, in contrast to existing HBO algorithms, can exploit the interdependent effects of various input components on the output of the unknown objective function f for boosting the BO performance and still preserve scalability in the number of input dimensions without requiring prior knowledge or the existence of a low (effective) dimension of the input space. To realize this, we propose a sparse yet rich factor graph representation of f to be exploited for designing an acquisition function that can be similarly represented by a sparse factor graph and hence be efficiently optimized in a decentralized manner using distributed message passing. Despite richly characterizing the interdependent effects of the input components on the output of f with a factor graph, DEC-HBO can still guarantee (asymptotic) no-regret performance. Empirical evaluation on synthetic and real-world experiments shows that DEC-HBO outperforms the state-of-the-art HBO algorithms.