Acquisition for Spherical-Linear Bayesian Optimization on the Cube

Nathan Wycoff

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arXiv · 2610.32628

Acquisition for Spherical-Linear Bayesian Optimization on the Cube

Nathan Wycoff

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Abstract

Recent work demonstrated that executing Bayesian Optimization (BO) using simply a linear surrogate with a clever transformation is enough to approximate the performance of the standard Gaussian-Process (GP) based version on high-dimensional test functions. When the decision region is a sphere, this strategy admits rapid exact acquisition. However, it is the unit cube we encounter most often in the BO literature, and in this setting a standard approach, namely a multi-start quasi-Newton method, is employed for solving the acquisition subproblem. In this article, we will discuss a series of results, both positive and negative, regarding the complexity of global resolution of various acquisition subproblems over the unit cube. On the basis of this discussion, we will propose a new acquisition function which is globally optimizable using significantly less execution time than the incumbent approach while maintaining or improving performance. The resulting method is competitive with GP-based BO in terms of accuracy per evaluation, and is superior in terms of accuracy per walltime on black-boxes of low to moderate computational intensity.

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Nathan Wycoff. 2026-10-23. Acquisition for Spherical-Linear Bayesian Optimization on the Cube. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32628

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