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Carl Hvarfner

8 accepted papers

2026

$\alpha$-PFN: Fast Entropy Search via In-Context Learning

ICML 2026poster

Information-theoretic acquisition functions such as Entropy Search (ES) offer a principled exploration–exploitation framework for Bayesian optimization (BO). However, their practical implementation relies on complicated and slow approximations, i.e., a Monte Carlo estimation of the information gain.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Informed Initialization for Bayesian Optimization and Active Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a widely used method for optimizing expensive black-box functions, relying on probabilistic surrogate models such as Gaussian Processes (GPs). The quality of the surrogate model is crucial for good optimization performance, especially in the few-shot setting where only…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Vanilla Bayesian Optimization Performs Great in High Dimensions

ICML 2024poster

High-dimensional optimization problems have long been considered the Achilles' heel of Bayesian optimization algorithms. Spurred by the curse of dimensionality, a large collection of algorithms aim to make BO more performant in this setting, commonly by imposing various simplifying assumptions on th…

2023

PriorBand: Practical Hyperparameter Optimization in the Age of Deep Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Hyperparameters of Deep Learning (DL) pipelines are crucial for their downstream performance. While a large number of methods for Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) have been developed, their incurred costs are often untenable for modern DL. Consequently, manual experimentation is still the most pre…

2023

Self-Correcting Bayesian Optimization through Bayesian Active Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Gaussian processes are the model of choice in Bayesian optimization and active learning. Yet, they are highly dependent on cleverly chosen hyperparameters to reach their full potential, and little effort is devoted to finding good hyperparameters in the literature. We demonstrate the impact of selec…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2022

$\pi$BO: Augmenting Acquisition Functions with User Beliefs for Bayesian Optimization

ICLR 2022poster

Bayesian optimization (BO) has become an established framework and popular tool for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) of machine learning (ML) algorithms. While known for its sample-efficiency, vanilla BO can not utilize readily available prior beliefs the practitioner has on the potential location…

Cited by 80SourcePDFScholar