Risk-Controlling Model Selection via Guided Bayesian Optimization
Bracha Laufer-Goldshtein Adam Fisch Regina Barzilay Tommi Jaakkola
Adjustable hyperparameters of machine learning models typically impact
various key trade-offs such as accuracy, fairness, robustness, or inference
cost. Our goal in this paper is to find a configuration that adheres to
user-specified limits on certain risks while being useful with respect to other
conflicting metrics. We solve this by combining Bayesian Optimization (BO) with
rigorous risk-controlling procedures, where our core idea is to steer BO
towards an efficient testing strategy. Our BO method identifies a set of Pareto
optimal configurations residing in a designated region of interest. The
resulting candidates are statistically verified and the best-performing
configuration is selected with guaranteed risk levels. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of our approach on a range of tasks with multiple desiderata,
including low error rates, equitable predictions, handling spurious
correlations, managing rate and distortion in generative models, and reducing
computational costs.