Papers › Multi-objective optimisation via the R2 utilities
Multi-objective optimisation via the R2 utilities
Ben Tu, Nikolas Kantas, Robert M. Lee, Behrang Shafei
The goal of multi-objective optimisation is to identify a collection of points which describe the best possible trade-offs between the multiple objectives. In order to solve this vector-valued optimisation problem, practitioners often appeal to the use of scalarisation functions in order to transform the multi-objective problem into a collection of single-objective problems. This set of scalarised problems can then be solved using traditional single-objective optimisation techniques. In this work, we formalise this convention into a general mathematical framework. We show how this strategy effectively recasts the original multi-objective optimisation problem into a single-objective optimisation problem defined over sets. An appropriate class of objective functions for this new problem are the R2 utilities, which are utility functions that are defined as a weighted integral over the scalarised optimisation problems. As part of our work, we show that these utilities are monotone and submodular set functions which can be optimised effectively using greedy optimisation algorithms. We then analyse the performance of these greedy algorithms both theoretically and empirically. Our analysis largely focusses on Bayesian optimisation, which is a popular probabilistic framework for black-box optimisation.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections