Physics-Aware Multifidelity Bayesian Optimization: a Generalized Formulation
This addresses optimization problems in science and engineering, such as design and health monitoring, by incorporating physical context to improve efficiency, though it is incremental as it builds on existing multifidelity methods.
The paper tackles the computational cost of high-fidelity models in optimization by proposing a physics-aware multifidelity Bayesian optimization method that embeds domain knowledge to accelerate data-driven searches, resulting in enhanced management of multiple information sources and contained computational expense.
The adoption of high-fidelity models for many-query optimization problems is majorly limited by the significant computational cost required for their evaluation at every query. Multifidelity Bayesian methods (MFBO) allow to include costly high-fidelity responses for a sub-selection of queries only, and use fast lower-fidelity models to accelerate the optimization process. State-of-the-art methods rely on a purely data-driven search and do not include explicit information about the physical context. This paper acknowledges that prior knowledge about the physical domains of engineering problems can be leveraged to accelerate these data-driven searches, and proposes a generalized formulation for MFBO to embed a form of domain awareness during the optimization procedure. In particular, we formalize a bias as a multifidelity acquisition function that captures the physical structure of the domain. This permits to partially alleviate the data-driven search from learning the domain properties on-the-fly, and sensitively enhances the management of multiple sources of information. The method allows to efficiently include high-fidelity simulations to guide the optimization search while containing the overall computational expense. Our physics-aware multifidelity Bayesian optimization is presented and illustrated for two classes of optimization problems frequently met in science and engineering, namely design optimization and health monitoring problems.