{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-general-recipe-for-likelihood-free-bayesian","title":"A General Recipe for Likelihood-free Bayesian Optimization","arxiv_id":"2206.13035","date":"2022-06-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jiaming Song","Lantao Yu","Willie Neiswanger","Stefano Ermon"],"abstract":"The acquisition function, a critical component in Bayesian optimization (BO), can often be written as the expectation of a utility function under a surrogate model. However, to ensure that acquisition functions are tractable to optimize, restrictions must be placed on the surrogate model and utility function. To extend BO to a broader class of models and utilities, we propose likelihood-free BO (LFBO), an approach based on likelihood-free inference. LFBO directly models the acquisition function without having to separately perform inference with a probabilistic surrogate model. We show that computing the acquisition function in LFBO can be reduced to optimizing a weighted classification problem, where the weights correspond to the utility being chosen. By choosing the utility function for expected improvement (EI), LFBO outperforms various state-of-the-art black-box optimization methods on several real-world optimization problems. LFBO can also effectively leverage composite structures of the objective function, which further improves its regret by several orders of magnitude.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13035v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.13035v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-general-recipe-for-likelihood-free-bayesian","repo_url":"https://github.com/lfbo-ml/lfbo","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"bayesian-optimization","task_name":"Bayesian Optimization"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2206.13035","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2206.13035","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2206.13035"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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