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Diversity By Design: Leveraging Distribution Matching for Offline Model-Based Optimization

2025/01/30 by Michael S. Yao, Yao, Michael S., James C. Gee +3
Decision Sciences · Engineering · #Advanced Control Systems Optimization #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Simulation Techniques and Applications

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.18768

openalex publication_date 2025/01/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

The goal of offline model-based optimization (MBO) is to propose new designs that maximize a reward function given only an offline dataset. However, an important desiderata is to also propose a diverse set of final candidates that capture many optimal and near-optimal design configurations. We propose Diversity in Adversarial Model-based Optimization (DynAMO) as a novel method to introduce design diversity as an explicit objective into any MBO problem. Our key insight is to formulate diversity as a distribution matching problem where the distribution of generated designs captures the inherent diversity contained within the offline dataset. Extensive experiments spanning multiple scientific domains show that DynAMO can be used with common optimization methods to significantly improve the diversity of proposed designs while still discovering high-quality candidates.

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