BONSAI: Bayesian Optimization with Natural Simplicity and Interpretability

TL;DR

BONSAI is a Bayesian optimization method that minimizes deviations from default configurations, improving interpretability and efficiency while maintaining theoretical guarantees and competitive performance.

Contribution

It introduces a default-aware BO policy that prunes low-impact deviations, with theoretical regret bounds and minimal additional computational cost.

Findings

Reduces non-default parameters in recommendations significantly.

Maintains competitive optimization performance.

Increases candidate-generation cost only 1.5 times compared to standard BO.

Abstract

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular technique for sample-efficient optimization of black-box functions. In many applications, the parameters being tuned come with a carefully engineered default configuration, and practitioners only want to deviate from this default when necessary. Standard BO, however, does not aim to minimize deviation from the default and, in practice, often pushes weakly relevant parameters to the boundary of the search space. This makes it difficult to distinguish between important and spurious changes and increases the burden of vetting recommendations when the optimization objective omits relevant operational considerations. We introduce BONSAI, a default-aware BO policy that prunes low-impact deviations from a default configuration while explicitly controlling the loss in acquisition value. BONSAI is compatible with a variety of acquisition functions, including expected improvement and upper confidence bound (GP-UCB). We theoretically bound the regret incurred by BONSAI, showing that, under certain conditions, it enjoys the same no-regret property as vanilla GP-UCB. Moreover, assuming known ARD lengthscales -- the same assumption underlying GP-UCB regret bounds -- BONSAI provably recovers the relevant-coordinate set at zero acquisition cost, yielding a method that matches the GP-UCB regret rate while recovering the minimal-$\ell_0$ solution -- a guarantee not provided by prior sparse-BO methods. Across many real-world applications, we empirically find that BONSAI substantially reduces the number of non-default parameters in recommended configurations while maintaining competitive optimization performance, with little effect on wall time -- averaging only $1.5\times$ the candidate-generation cost of standard BO, compared to $7$-$34\times$ on average for prior sparse-BO methods (IR, ER, and SEBO).