Information-Theoretic Safe Bayesian Optimization
Alessandro G. Bottero Carlos E. Luis Julia Vinogradska Felix Berkenkamp Jan Peters
We consider a sequential decision making task, where the goal is to optimize
an unknown function without evaluating parameters that violate an a~priori
unknown (safety) constraint. A common approach is to place a Gaussian process
prior on the unknown functions and allow evaluations only in regions that are
safe with high probability. Most current methods rely on a discretization of
the domain and cannot be directly extended to the continuous case. Moreover,
the way in which they exploit regularity assumptions about the constraint
introduces an additional critical hyperparameter. In this paper, we propose an
information-theoretic safe exploration criterion that directly exploits the GP
posterior to identify the most informative safe parameters to evaluate. The
combination of this exploration criterion with a well known Bayesian
optimization acquisition function yields a novel safe Bayesian optimization
selection criterion. Our approach is naturally applicable to continuous domains
and does not require additional explicit hyperparameters. We theoretically
analyze the method and show that we do not violate the safety constraint with
high probability and that we learn about the value of the safe optimum up to
arbitrary precision. Empirical evaluations demonstrate improved data-efficiency
and scalability.