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Behrang Shafei

5 accepted papers

2025

BARK: A Fully Bayesian Tree Kernel for Black-box Optimization

ICML 2025poster

We perform Bayesian optimization using a Gaussian process perspective on Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART). Our BART Kernel (BARK) uses tree agreement to define a posterior over piecewise-constant functions, and we explore the space of tree kernels using a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach.…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Transition Constrained Bayesian Optimization via Markov Decision Processes

NeurIPS 2024poster

Bayesian optimization is a methodology to optimize black-box functions. Traditionally, it focuses on the setting where you can arbitrarily query the search space. However, many real-life problems do not offer this flexibility; in particular, the search space of the next query may depend on previous…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2022

Joint Entropy Search for Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization

NeurIPS 2022accept

Many real-world problems can be phrased as a multi-objective optimization problem, where the goal is to identify the best set of compromises between the competing objectives. Multi-objective Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sample efficient strategy that can be deployed to solve these vector-valued o…

2022

SnAKe: Bayesian Optimization with Pathwise Exploration

NeurIPS 2022accept

"Bayesian Optimization is a very effective tool for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Inspired by applications developing and characterizing reaction chemistry using droplet microfluidic reactors, we consider a novel setting where the expense of evaluating the function can increase significa…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2022

Tree ensemble kernels for Bayesian optimization with known constraints over mixed-feature spaces

NeurIPS 2022accept

Tree ensembles can be well-suited for black-box optimization tasks such as algorithm tuning and neural architecture search, as they achieve good predictive performance with little or no manual tuning, naturally handle discrete feature spaces, and are relatively insensitive to outliers in the trainin…