Human-AI Collaborative Bayesian Optimisation

Abstract Human-AI collaboration looks at harnessing the complementary strengths of both humans and AI. We propose a new method for human-AI collaboration in Bayesian optimisation where the optimum is mainly pursued by the Bayesian optimisation algorithm following complex computation, whilst getting occasional help from the accompanying expert having a deeper knowledge of the underlying physical phenomenon. We expect experts to have some understanding of the correlation structures of the experimental system, but not the location of the optimum. The expert provides feedback by either changing the current recommendation or providing her belief on the good and bad regions of the search space based on the current observations. Our proposed method takes such feedback to build a model that aligns with the expert’s model and then uses it for optimisation. We provide theoretical underpinning on why such an approach may be more efficient than the one without expert’s feedback. The empirical results show the robustness and superiority of our method with promising efficiency gains.