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Benjamin Letham

7 accepted papers

2026

LILO: Bayesian Optimization with Natural Language Feedback

ICML 2026poster

Many real-world optimization problems are guided by complex, subjective preferences that are difficult to express as explicit closed-form objectives. In response, we introduce Language-in-the-Loop Optimization (LILO), a Bayesian optimization (BO) framework that employs a large language model (LLM) t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Active Learning for Derivative-Based Global Sensitivity Analysis with Gaussian Processes

NeurIPS 2024poster

We consider the problem of active learning for global sensitivity analysis of expensive black-box functions. Our aim is to efficiently learn the importance of different input variables, e.g., in vehicle safety experimentation, we study the impact of the thickness of various components on safety obje…

2024

Response Time Improves Gaussian Process Models for Perception and Preferences

UAI 2024poster

Models for human choice prediction in preference learning and perception science often use binary response data, requiring many samples to accurately learn latent utilities or perceptual intensities. The response time (RT) to make each choice captures additional information about the decision proces…

2024

Robust Gaussian Processes via Relevance Pursuit

NeurIPS 2024poster

Gaussian processes (GPs) are non-parametric probabilistic regression models that are popular due to their flexibility, data efficiency, and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. However, standard GP models assume homoskedastic Gaussian noise, while many real-world applications are subject to non-Ga…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

A Semi-parametric Model for Decision Making in High-Dimensional Sensory Discrimination Tasks

AAAI 2023technical

Psychometric functions typically characterize binary sensory decisions along a single stimulus dimension. However, real-life sensory tasks vary along a greater variety of dimensions (e.g. color, contrast and luminance for visual stimuli). Approaches to characterizing high-dimensional sensory spaces…

2022

Look-Ahead Acquisition Functions for Bernoulli Level Set Estimation

AISTATS 2022poster

Level set estimation (LSE) is the problem of identifying regions where an unknown function takes values above or below a specified threshold. Active sampling strategies for efficient LSE have primarily been studied in continuous-valued functions. Motivated by applications in human psychophysics wher…