Bayesian Optimization for Policy Search in High-Dimensional Systems via Automatic Domain Selection
This addresses the challenge of high-dimensional optimization in robotics and control systems, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles scaling Bayesian Optimization to high-dimensional control tasks by using a learned dynamics model and model-based controller to focus on relevant regions and reduce effective dimensionality, achieving experimental validation on a 48-dimensional quadcopter policy.
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is an effective method for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions with a wide range of applications for example in robotics, system design and parameter optimization. However, scaling BO to problems with large input dimensions (>10) remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose to leverage results from optimal control to scale BO to higher dimensional control tasks and to reduce the need for manually selecting the optimization domain. The contributions of this paper are twofold: 1) We show how we can make use of a learned dynamics model in combination with a model-based controller to simplify the BO problem by focusing onto the most relevant regions of the optimization domain. 2) Based on (1) we present a method to find an embedding in parameter space that reduces the effective dimensionality of the optimization problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we present an experimental evaluation on real hardware, as well as simulated tasks including a 48-dimensional policy for a quadcopter.