Preference BO with Ax

[Kh-im]

Hello,

Thanks everyone for the great work on Ax :).

I want to try preference BO (https://botorch.org/tutorials/preference_bo) in Ax API to benefit from search space easy writing, rendering, json, etc.

Is it possible ? If yes, what are the steps I will have to follow here ?

Regards,

[Balandat]

Hi @Kh-im, thanks for your interest. We are planning to expose an interface to preference learning in Ax, but I'm not sure about the timeline for this. Maybe @lena-kashtelyan or @ItsMrLin have more info on this?

[eytan]

Another thing to note here is that this tutorial uses a method from a workshop paper https://itsmrlin.com/papers/2020_icml_pref.pdf that might be a bit tricky to implement in Ax, so the timeline for that will likely be longer than getting standard Preference-based Bayesian Optimization algorithms and Preference learning algorithms into Ax. The standard methods just map inputs directly to a latent utility, whereas the method from the Lin et al paper involve a latent utility model mapping outcomes to utilities and a multi-output GP mapping inputs to outcomes.

Eytan

On Sun, Dec 12, 2021 at 10:40 AM Max Balandat @.***> wrote:

Hi @Kh-im https://github.com/Kh-im, thanks for your interest. We are planning to expose an interface to preference learning in Ax, but I'm not sure about the timeline for this. Maybe @lena-kashtelyan https://github.com/lena-kashtelyan or @ItsMrLin https://github.com/ItsMrLin have more info on this?

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[ItsMrLin]

Hi @Kh-im, I believe the tutorial actually uses the vanilla PL where it doesn't involve a separate multi-output GP, so it will be relatively easier to support in Ax. That being said, we don't currently have an exact date of when this will be supported, but we do plan on having a tutorial notebook released in the next few months. Please check back then 🙂

[lena-kashtelyan]

Thank you for chiming in, @ItsMrLin, @Balandat, and @eytan! @Kh-im, sounds like we plan on having support for this in Ax and an example notebook sometime in the near future (few months, as @ItsMrLin points out), so I'll mark this issue as a feature request and leave it open for now.

[Kh-im]

Ok! Thanks for your answer.

[lena-kashtelyan]

I'll keep this on the wishlist for now, but we're working on this and this functionality will likely make it to Ax open-source this year