We study Bayesian optimization problems where observation of the objective function fails stochastically, e.g., synthesis failures in materials development. For this problem, although several heuristic methods have been proposed, they do not have theoretical guarantees and sometimes deteriorate in practice. We propose two algorithms that have a trade-off relation between regret bounds and practical performance. The first one is the first no-regret algorithm for this problem. The second one shows superior practical performance; however, we need some modification of the algorithm to obtain a no-regret guarantee, which is slightly worse than the first one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in numerical experiments, including the simulation function motivated by quasi-crystal synthesis.

Gaussian process regression (GPR) or kernel ridge regression is a widely used and powerful tool for nonlinear prediction. Therefore, active learning (AL) for GPR, which actively collects data labels to achieve an accurate prediction with fewer data labels, is an important problem. However, existing AL methods do not theoretically guarantee prediction accuracy for target distribution. Furthermore, as discussed in the distributionally robust learning literature, specifying the target distribution is often difficult. Thus, this paper proposes two AL methods that effectively reduce the worst-case expected error for GPR, which is the worst-case expectation in target distribution candidates. We show an upper bound of the worst-case expected squared error, which suggests that the error will be arbitrarily small by a finite number of data labels under mild conditions. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods through synthetic and real-world datasets.

Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is a theoretically established algorithm for Bayesian optimization (BO), where we assume the objective function ƒ follows a GP. One notable drawback of GP-UCB is that the theoretical confidence parameter β increases along with the iterations and is too large. To alleviate this drawback, this paper analyzes the randomized variant of GP-UCB called improved randomized GP-UCB (IRGP-UCB), which uses the confidence parameter generated from the shifted exponential distribution. We analyze the expected regret and conditional expected regret, where the expectation and the probability are taken respectively with ƒ and noise and with the randomness of the BO algorithm. In both regret analyses, IRGP-UCB achieves a sub-linear regret upper bound without increasing the confidence parameter if the input domain is finite. Furthermore, we show that randomization plays a key role in avoiding an increase in confidence parameter by showing that GP-UCB using a constant confidence parameter can incur linearly growing expected cumulative regret. Finally, we show numerical experiments using synthetic and benchmark functions and real-world emulators.

In this study, we propose a novel multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) method to efficiently identify the Pareto front (PF) defined by risk measures for black-box functions under the presence of input uncertainty (IU). Existing BO methods for Pareto optimization in the presence of IU are risk-specific or without theoretical guarantees, whereas our proposed method addresses general risk measures and has theoretical guarantees. The basic idea of the proposed method is to assume a Gaussian process (GP) model for the black-box function and to construct high-probability bounding boxes for the risk measures using the GP model. Furthermore, in order to reduce the uncertainty of non-dominated bounding boxes, we propose a method of selecting the next evaluation point using a maximin distance defined by the maximum value of a quasi distance based on bounding boxes. As theoretical analysis, we prove that the algorithm can return an arbitrary-accurate solution in a finite number of iterations with high probability, for various risk measures such as Bayes risk, worst-case risk, and value-at-risk. We also give a theoretical analysis that takes into account approximation errors because there exist non-negligible approximation errors (e.g., finite approximation of PFs and sampling-based approximation of bounding boxes) in practice. We confirm that the proposed method performs as well or better than existing methods not only in the setting with IU but also in the setting of ordinary MOBO through numerical experiments.

Real-world black-box optimization tasks often focus on obtaining the best reward, which includes an intrinsic random quantity from uncontrollable environmental factors. For this problem, we formulate a novel risk-seeking optimization problem whose aim is to obtain the best possible reward within a fixed budget under uncontrollable factors. We consider two settings: (1) environmental model setting for the case that we can observe uncontrollable environmental variables that affect the observation as the input of a target function, and (2) heteroscedastic model setting for the case that any uncontrollable variables cannot be observed. We propose a novel Bayesian optimization method called kernel explore-then-commit (kernel-ETC) and provide the regret upper bound for both settings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of kernel-ETC through several numerical experiments, including the hyperparameter tuning task and the simulation function derived from polymer synthesis real data.

Among various acquisition functions (AFs) in Bayesian optimization (BO), Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) and Thompson sampling (TS) are well-known options with established theoretical properties regarding Bayesian cumulative regret (BCR). Recently, it has been shown that a randomized variant of GP-UCB achieves a tighter BCR bound compared with GP-UCB, which we call the tighter BCR bound for brevity. Inspired by this study, this paper first shows that TS achieves the tighter BCR bound. On the other hand, GP-UCB and TS often practically suffer from manual hyperparameter tuning and over-exploration issues, respectively. Therefore, we analyze yet another AF called a probability of improvement from the maximum of a sample path (PIMS). We show that PIMS achieves the tighter BCR bound and avoids the hyperparameter tuning, unlike GP-UCB. Furthermore, we demonstrate a wide range of experiments, focusing on the effectiveness of PIMS that mitigates the practical issues of GP-UCB and TS.

Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is a theoretically promising approach for black-box optimization; however, the confidence parameter $\beta$ is considerably large in the theorem and chosen heuristically in practice. Then, randomized GP-UCB (RGP-UCB) uses a randomized confidence parameter, which follows the Gamma distribution, to mitigate the impact of manually specifying $\beta$. This study first generalizes the regret analysis of RGP-UCB to a wider class of distributions, including the Gamma distribution. Furthermore, we propose improved RGP-UCB (IRGP-UCB) based on a two-parameter exponential distribution, which achieves tighter Bayesian regret bounds. IRGP-UCB does not require an increase in the confidence parameter in terms of the number of iterations, which avoids over-exploration in the later iterations. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of IRGP-UCB through extensive experiments.

In black-box function optimization, we need to consider not only controllable design variables but also uncontrollable stochastic environment variables. In such cases, it is necessary to solve the optimization problem by taking into account the uncertainty of the environmental variables. Chance-constrained (CC) problem, the problem of maximizing the expected value under a certain level of constraint satisfaction probability, is one of the practically important problems in the presence of environmental variables. In this study, we consider distributionally robust CC (DRCC) problem and propose a novel DRCC Bayesian optimization method for the case where the distribution of the environmental variables cannot be precisely specified. We show that the proposed method can find an arbitrary accurate solution with high probability in a finite number of trials, and confirm the usefulness of the proposed method through numerical experiments.

Complex processes in science and engineering are often formulated as multistage decision-making problems. In this letter, we consider a cascade process, a type of multistage decision-making process. This is a multistage process in which the output of one stage is used as an input for the subsequent stage. When the cost of each stage is expensive, it is difficult to search for the optimal controllable parameters for each stage exhaustively. To address this problem, we formulate the optimization of the cascade process as an extension of the Bayesian optimization framework and propose two types of acquisition functions based on credible intervals and expected improvement. We investigate the theoretical properties of the proposed acquisition functions and demonstrate their effectiveness through numerical experiments. In addition, we consider suspension setting, an extension in which we are allowed to suspend the cascade process at the middle of the multistage decision-making process that often arises in practical problems. We apply the proposed method in a test problem involving a solar cell simulator, the motivation for this study.

We consider active learning (AL) in an uncertain environment in which trade-off between multiple risk measures need to be considered. As an AL problem in such an uncertain environment, we study Mean-Variance Analysis in Bayesian Optimization (MVA-BO) setting. Mean-variance analysis was developed in the field of financial engineering and has been used to make decisions that take into account the trade-off between the average and variance of investment uncertainty. In this paper, we specifically focus on BO setting with an uncertain component and consider multi-task, multi-objective, and constrained optimization scenarios for the mean-variance trade-off of the uncertain component. When the target blackbox function is modeled by Gaussian Process (GP), we derive the bounds of the two risk measures and propose AL algorithm for each of the above three scenarios based on the risk measure bounds. We show the effectiveness of the proposed AL algorithms through theoretical analysis and numerical experiments.

Many cases exist in which a black-box function $f$ with high evaluation cost depends on two types of variables $\bm x$ and $\bm w$, where $\bm x$ is a controllable \emph{design} variable and $\bm w$ are uncontrollable \emph{environmental} variables that have random variation following a certain distribution $P$. In such cases, an important task is to find the range of design variables $\bm x$ such that the function $f(\bm x, \bm w)$ has the desired properties by incorporating the random variation of the environmental variables $\bm w$. A natural measure of robustness is the probability that $f(\bm x, \bm w)$ exceeds a given threshold $h$, which is known as the \emph{probability threshold robustness} (PTR) measure in the literature on robust optimization. However, this robustness measure cannot be correctly evaluated when the distribution $P$ is unknown. In this study, we addressed this problem by considering the \textit{distributionally robust PTR} (DRPTR) measure, which considers the worst-case PTR within given candidate distributions. Specifically, we studied the problem of efficiently identifying a reliable set $H$, which is defined as a region in which the DRPTR measure exceeds a certain desired probability $\alpha$, which can be interpreted as a level set estimation (LSE) problem for DRPTR. We propose a theoretically grounded and computationally efficient active learning method for this problem. We show that the proposed method has theoretical guarantees on convergence and accuracy, and confirmed through numerical experiments that the proposed method outperforms existing methods.

In many product development problems, the performance of the product is governed by two types of parameters: design parameters and environmental parameters. While the former is fully controllable, the latter varies depending on the environment in which the product is used. The challenge of such a problem is to find the design parameter that maximizes the probability that the performance of the product will meet the desired requisite level given the variation of the environmental parameter. In this letter, we formulate this practical problem as active learning (AL) problems and propose efficient algorithms with theoretically guaranteed performance. Our basic idea is to use a gaussian process (GP) model as the surrogate model of the product development process and then to formulate our AL problems as Bayesian quadrature optimization problems for probabilistic threshold robustness (PTR) measure. We derive credible intervals for the PTR measure and propose AL algorithms for the optimization and level set estimation of the PTR measure. We clarify the theoretical properties of the proposed algorithms and demonstrate their efficiency in both synthetic and real-world product development problems.

Image segmentation is one of the most fundamental tasks in computer vision. In many practical applications, it is essential to properly evaluate the reliability of individual segmentation results. In this study, we propose a novel framework for quantifying the statistical significance of individual segmentation results in the form of p-values by statistically testing the difference between the object region and the background region. This seemingly simple problem is actually quite challenging because the difference --- called segmentation bias --- can be deceptively large due to the adaptation of the segmentation algorithm to the data. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce a statistical approach called selective inference, and develop a framework for computing valid p-values in which segmentation bias is properly accounted for. Although the proposed framework is potentially applicable to various segmentation algorithms, we focus in this paper on graph-cut- and threshold-based segmentation algorithms, and develop two specific methods for computing valid p-values for the segmentation results obtained by these algorithms. We prove the theoretical validity of these two methods and demonstrate their practicality by applying them to the segmentation of medical images.

In this letter, we study an active learning problem for maximizing an unknown linear function with high-dimensional binary features. This problem is notoriously complex but arises in many important contexts. When the sampling budget, that is, the number of possible function evaluations, is smaller than the number of dimensions, it tends to be impossible to identify all of the optimal binary features. Therefore, in practice, only a small number of such features are considered, with the majority kept fixed at certain default values, which we call the working set heuristic. The main contribution of this letter is to formally study the working set heuristic and present a suite of theoretically robust algorithms for more efficient use of the sampling budget. Technically, we introduce a novel method for estimating the confidence regions of model parameters that is tailored to active learning with high-dimensional binary features. We provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of these algorithms and prove that a commonly used working set heuristic can identify optimal binary features with favorable sample complexity. We explore the performance of the proposed approach through numerical simulations and an application to a functional protein design problem.

Testing under what conditions a product satisfies the desired properties is a fundamental problem in manufacturing industry. If the condition and the property are respectively regarded as the input and the output of a black-box function, this task can be interpreted as the problem called level set estimation (LSE): the problem of identifying input regions such that the function value is above (or below) a threshold. Although various methods for LSE problems have been developed, many issues remain to be solved for their practical use. As one of such issues, we consider the case where the input conditions cannot be controlled precisely-LSE problems under input uncertainty. We introduce a basic framework for handling input uncertainty in LSE problems and then propose efficient methods with proper theoretical guarantees. The proposed methods and theories can be generally applied to a variety of challenges related to LSE under input uncertainty such as cost-dependent input uncertainties and unknown input uncertainties. We apply the proposed methods to artificial and real data to demonstrate their applicability and effectiveness.

We study active learning (AL) based on gaussian processes (GPs) for efficiently enumerating all of the local minimum solutions of a black-box function. This problem is challenging because local solutions are characterized by their zero gradient and positive-definite Hessian properties, but those derivatives cannot be directly observed. We propose a new AL method in which the input points are sequentially selected such that the confidence intervals of the GP derivatives are effectively updated for enumerating local minimum solutions. We theoretically analyze the proposed method and demonstrate its usefulness through numerical experiments.