December 10, 2020
In many real-world scenarios, decision makers seek to efficiently optimize multiple competing objectives in a sample-efficient fashion. Multi-objective Bayesian optimization (BO) is a common approach, but many of the best-performing acquisition functions do not have known analytic gradients and suffer from high computational overhead. We leverage recent advances in programming models and hardware acceleration for multi-objective BO using Expected Hypervolume Improvement (EHVI)---an algorithm notorious for its high computational complexity. We derive a novel formulation of q-Expected Hypervolume Improvement (qEHVI), an acquisition function that extends EHVI to the parallel, constrained evaluation setting. qEHVI is an exact computation of the joint EHVI of q new candidate points (up to Monte-Carlo (MC) integration error). Whereas previous EHVI formulations rely on gradient-free acquisition optimization or approximated gradients, we compute exact gradients of the MC estimator via auto-differentiation, thereby enabling efficient and effective optimization using first-order and quasi-second-order methods. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that qEHVI is computationally tractable in many practical scenarios and outperforms state-of-the-art multi-objective BO algorithms at a fraction of their wall time.
Written by
Samuel Daulton
Maximilian Balandat
Eytan Bakshy
Publisher
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020)
Research Topics
Core Machine Learning
May 26, 2026
Valentin Wyart, Huy V. Vo, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Marc Szafraniec, Max Seitzer, Patrick Labatut, Piotr Bojanowski
May 26, 2026
May 19, 2026
Alvin W. M. Tan, Nicolas Hamilakis, Manel Khentout, Sho Tsuji, Balázs Kégl, Michael C. Frank, Angel Villar Corrales, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Dongyan Lin, Emmanuel Dupoux, Jiayi Shen, Juan Pino, Mahi Luthra, Martin Gleize, Phillip Rust, Rashel Moritz, Sheila Krogh-Jespersen, Surya Parimi, Tom Fizycki, Vanessa Stark, Yosuke Higuchi, Youssef Benchekroun
May 19, 2026
May 17, 2026
Alexandre Rezende, Rohit Patel, Steven McClain
May 17, 2026
May 12, 2026
Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit
May 12, 2026
October 31, 2019
Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato
October 31, 2019
October 27, 2019
Zhuoyuan Chen, Demi Guo, Tong Xiao, Saining Xie, Xinlei Chen, Haonan Yu, Jonathan Gray, Kavya Srinet, Haoqi Fan, Jerry Ma, Charles R. Qi, Shubham Tulsiani, Arthur Szlam, Larry Zitnick
October 27, 2019
April 25, 2020
Yilun Du, Joshua Meier, Jerry Ma, Rob Fergus, Alexander Rives
April 25, 2020
June 11, 2019
Yuandong Tian, Jerry Ma, Qucheng Gong, Shubho Sengupta, Zhuoyuan Chen, James Pinkerton, Larry Zitnick
June 11, 2019

Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models