{"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/pabbo-preferential-amortized-black-box","title":"PABBO: Preferential Amortized Black-Box Optimization","arxiv_id":"2503.00924","date":"2025-03-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xinyu Zhang","Daolang Huang","Samuel Kaski","Julien Martinelli"],"abstract":"Preferential Bayesian Optimization (PBO) is a sample-efficient method to learn latent user utilities from preferential feedback over a pair of designs. It relies on a statistical surrogate model for the latent function, usually a Gaussian process, and an acquisition strategy to select the next candidate pair to get user feedback on. Due to the non-conjugacy of the associated likelihood, every PBO step requires a significant amount of computations with various approximate inference techniques. This computational overhead is incompatible with the way humans interact with computers, hindering the use of PBO in real-world cases. Building on the recent advances of amortized BO, we propose to circumvent this issue by fully amortizing PBO, meta-learning both the surrogate and the acquisition function. Our method comprises a novel transformer neural process architecture, trained using reinforcement learning and tailored auxiliary losses. On a benchmark composed of synthetic and real-world datasets, our method is several orders of magnitude faster than the usual Gaussian process-based strategies and often outperforms them in accuracy.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00924v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00924v1.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":"pabbo-preferential-amortized-black-box","repo_url":"https://github.com/xinyuzc/PABBO","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"bayesian-optimization","task_name":"Bayesian Optimization"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2503.00924","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2503.00924"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+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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