Abstract:
We consider the problem of sequentially maximizing an unknown function over a set of actions of the form , where the selected actions must satisfy a safety constraint with respect to an unknown safety function . We model and as lying in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), which facilitates the use of Gaussian process methods. While existing works for this setting have provided algorithms that are guaranteed to identify a near-optimal safe action, the problem of attaining low cumulative regret has remained largely unexplored, with a key challenge being that expanding the safe region can incur high regret. To address this challenge, we show that if is monotone with respect to just the single variable (with no such constraint on ), sublinear regret becomes achievable with our proposed algorithm. In addition, we show that a modified version of our algorithm is able to attain sublinear regret (for suitably defined notions of regret) for the task of finding a near-optimal corresponding to every , as opposed to only finding the global safe optimum. Our findings are supported with empirical evaluations on various objective and safety functions.
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