High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimisation with Gaussian Process Prior Variational Autoencoders

Bayesian optimisation (BO) using a Gaussian process (GP)-based surrogate model is a powerful tool for solving black-box optimisation problems but does not scale well to high-dimensional data. Previous works have proposed to use variational autoencoders (VAEs) to project high-dimensional data onto a low-dimensional latent space and to implement BO in the inferred latent space. In this work, we propose a conditional generative model for efficient high-dimensional BO that uses a GP surrogate model together with GP prior VAEs. A GP prior VAE extends the standard VAE by conditioning the generative and inference model on auxiliary covariates, capturing complex correlations across samples with a GP. Our model incorporates the observed target quantity values as auxiliary covariates learning a structured latent space that is better suited for the GP-based BO surrogate model. It handles partially observed auxiliary covariates using a unifying probabilistic framework and can also incorporate additional auxiliary covariates that may be available in real-world applications. We demonstrate that our method improves upon existing latent space BO methods on simulated datasets as well as on commonly used benchmarks.