Are You Concerned about Limited Function Evaluations: Data-Augmented Pareto Set Learning for Expensive Multi-Objective Optimization

Abstract

Optimizing multiple conflicting black-box objectives simultaneously is a prevalent occurrence in many real-world applications, such as neural architecture search, and machine learning. These problems are known as expensive multi-objective optimization problems (EMOPs) when the function evaluations are computationally or financially costly. Multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) offers an efficient approach to discovering a set of Pareto optimal solutions. However, the data deficiency issue caused by limited function evaluations has posed a great challenge to current optimization methods. Moreover, most current methods tend to prioritize the quality of candidate solutions, while ignoring the quantity of promising samples. In order to tackle these issues, our paper proposes a novel multi-objective Bayesian optimization algorithm with a data augmentation strategy that provides ample high-quality samples for Pareto set learning (PSL). Specifically, it utilizes Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to enrich data and a dominance prediction model to screen out high-quality samples, mitigating the predicament of limited function evaluations in EMOPs. Additionally, we adopt the regularity model to expensive multi-objective Bayesian optimization for PSL. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world problems demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art and classical algorithms.