Month: June 2024

Bayesian Optimization with Formal Safety Guarantees via Online Conformal Prediction

Motivation

In the general formulation of black-box optimization problems, a designer sequentially attempts candidate solutions, receiving noisy feedback on the value of each attempt from the system. As illustrated in Fig. 1, we consider scenarios in which feedback is also provided on the safety of the attempted solution, and the optimizer is constrained to limit the number of unsafe solutions that are tried throughout the optimization process [1] [2]. Focusing on methods based on Bayesian optimization (BO), prior works provide safety guarantee that any unsafe solution is excluded with a controllable probability with respect to feedback noise. This theoretical guarantee is, however, only valid if the optimizer has access to information about the constraint function, e.g., reproducible kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) norm bound of the constraint function. In practice, specifying such information may be difficult, since the constraint function is a priori unknown.

Fig. 1. Illustration of black-box optimization with safety constraints. We provide formal safety guarantee on keeping the fraction of unsafe solutions attempted during the optimization process below some tolerated threshold.

 

Safe-BO via Online Conformal Prediction

In our recent work, to appear in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, we study for the first time leveraging online conformal prediction (CP) for providing assumptions-free guarantees on the safety level of the attempted candidate solutions, while enabling any non-zero target safety violation level. As shown in Fig. 2, we introduce Safe-BOCP that models objective function and constraint function by using independent Gaussian processes (GPs) as surrogate models, calibrating the credible intervals constructed for safe sets adaptively based on the observation history via online CP [3] [4]. The key mechanism is to use safety feedback, in the form of a well-designed safety error signal, on the reliability of past decisions to adjust the post-processing of probabilistic surrogate model’s outputs. In contrast to previous safe BO methods assuming RKHS properties of the constraint function to ensure a strict safety guarantee, Safe-BOCP adopts a “caution-increasing” back-off strategy that compensates for the uncertainty on the boundaries of the safe regions without any assumptions.

Fig. 2. Block diagram of the main steps including safe set creation, producing the safe set, and of acquisition, selecting the next iterate.

 

Experiments

We compare Safe-BOCP with the state-of-the-art SAFEOPT in a safe movie recommendation problem and plug flow reactor (PFR) optimization problem. Fig. 3 plots the histograms of the ratings across all selected movies during the optimization procedure with varying target violation rates, showing that SAFEOPT does not meet the safety requirement (red dashed line) while D-SAFE-BOCP can correctly control the fraction of unsafe movies. As shown in Fig. 4, P-SAFE-BOCP is seen to meet the target reliability level irrespective of observation noise power, while SAFEOPT can only achieve it when the observation noise power is sufficiently large.

Fig. 3. Histograms of the ratings of recommended movies by SAFEOPT, as well by D-SAFE-BOCP under different target violation rates.

Fig. 4. Probability of excessive violation rate (top) and optimality ratio (bottom) as a function of constraint observation noise power.

 

References

[1] Y. Sui, A. Gotovos, J. Burdick, and A. Krause, “Safe exploration for optimization with Gaussian processes,” in Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning, Lille, France, 2015.
[2] F. Berkenkamp, A. Krause, and A. P. Schoellig, “Bayesian optimization with safety constraints: Safe and automatic parameter tuning in robotics,” Machine Learning, pp. 1–35, 2021.
[3] I. Gibbs and E. Candes, “Adaptive conformal inference under distribution shift,” in Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Virtual, 2021.
[4] S. Feldman, L. Ringel, S. Bates, and Y. Romano, “Achieving risk control in online learning settings,” Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2023.

Cross-Validation Conformal Risk Control

Motivation

Conformal risk control (CRC) [1] [2] is a recently proposed technique that applies post-hoc to a conventional point predictor to provide calibration guarantees. Generalizing conformal prediction (CP) [3], with CRC, calibration is ensured for a set predictor that is extracted from the point predictor to control a risk function such as the probability of miscoverage or the false negative rate. The original CRC requires the available data set to be split between training and validation data sets. This can be problematic when data availability is limited, resulting in inefficient set predictors. In [4], a novel CRC method is introduced that is based on cross-validation, rather than on validation as the original CRC. The proposed cross-validation CRC (CV-CRC) allows for the control of a broader range of risk functions, while proved to offer theoretical guarantees on the average risk of the set predictor, and reduced average set size with respect to CRC when the available data are limited.

Cross-Validation Conformal Risk Control

The objective of CRC is to design a set predictor with a mean risk no larger than a predefined level α, i.e.,

with test data input-label pair (x,y), and a set of N data pairs D.

The risk is defined between the  true label y and a predictive set Γ of labels.

VB-CRC generalizes VB-CP [2] in the sense it allows the risk taking arbitrary form under technical conditions such as boundness and monotonicity in the set. VB-CP is resorted when VB-CRC considers the special case of the miscoverage risk

In this work, we introduce CV-CRC, which is a cross-validation-based version of VB-CRC. In a similar manner how CV-CP [5] generalizes VB-CP, CV-CRC generalizes VB-CRC. See Fig. 1 for illustration.

Fig. 1. (top) validation-based CRC (bottom) the proposed method, CV-CRC.

In the top panel of Fig. 2, VB-CRC is shown as the outcome of available data split into training data and validation data. The former is used to train a model, while the latter is used to post process and control a threshold λ. Upon test input x, a predictive set Γ of labels y’s is formed. In the bottom panel, CV-CRC is illustrated as a generalization. Available data is split K≤N folds, and K leave-fold-out models are trained. Then, K predictive sets are formed and merged via a threshold that is set via the trained models and the left-fold-out data.

Fig. 2. (top) validation-based CRC (bottom) the proposed method, CV-CRC.

Experiments

To illustrate the main theorem that the risk guarantee (1) is met, while the average set sizes are expected to reduce, two experiments were conducted. The first is vector regression using maximum-likelihood learning, and is shown in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3. VB-CRC and CV-CRC for the vector regression problem.

The second problem is a temporal point process prediction, where a point process set predictor aims to predict sets that contain future events of a temporal process with false negative rate of no more than a predefined α. As can be seen, in both problems, CV-CRC is shown to be more data-efficient in the small data regime, while holding the risk condition (1).

 

Fig. 4. VB-CRC and CV-CRC for the temporal point process prediction problem.

Full details can be found at ISIT preprint [4].

References

[1] A. N. Angelopoulos, S. Bates, A. Fisch, L. Lei, and T. Schuster, “Conformal Risk Control,” in The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024.

[2] S. Feldman, L. Ringel, S. Bates, and Y. Romano, “Achieving Risk Control in Online Learning Settings,” Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2023.

[3] V. Vovk, A. Gammerman, and G. Shafer, Algorithmic Learning in a Random World. Springer, 2005, springer, New York.

[4] K. M. Cohen, S. Park, O. Simeone, and S. Shamai Shitz, “Cross-Validation Conformal Risk Control,” accepted to IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory Proceedings (ISIT2024), July 2024.

[5] R. F. Barber, E. J. Candes, A. Ramdas, and R. J. Tibshirani, “Predictive Inference with the Jackknife+,” The Annals of Statistics, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 486–507, 2021.