Robotics and automation offer massive accelerations for solving intractable, multivariate scientific problems such as materials discovery, but the available search spaces can be dauntingly large. Bayesian optimization (BO) has emerged as a popular sample-efficient optimization engine, thriving in tasks where no analytic form of the target function/property is known. Here we exploit expert human knowledge in the form of hypotheses to direct Bayesian searches more quickly to promising regions of chemical space. Previous methods have used underlying distributions derived from existing experimental measurements, which is unfeasible for new, unexplored scientific tasks. Also, such distributions cannot capture intricate hypotheses. Our proposed method, which we call HypBO, uses expert human hypotheses to generate an improved seed of samples. Unpromising seeds are automatically discounted, while promising seeds are used to augment the surrogate model data, thus achieving better-informed sampling. This process continues in a global versus local search fashion, organized in a bilevel optimization framework. We validate the performance of our method on a range of synthetic functions and demonstrate its practical utility on a real chemical design task where the use of expert hypotheses accelerates the search performance significantly.

机器人技术和自动化为解决材料发现等难以处理的多变量科学问题提供了巨大的加速，而巨大的搜索空间可能令人望而生畏。贝叶斯优化（BO）已成为一种流行的高效样本优化引擎，在目标函数/属性没有已知的解析形式的任务中蓬勃发展。本文利用专家人类假设的形式来更快地将贝叶斯搜索定向到化学空间的有前途的区域。我们提出的方法称为HypBO，利用专家人类假设生成改进的样本种子。不太有希望的种子被自动折扣，而有希望的种子被用于增加代理模型数据，从而实现更有信息的抽样。这个过程在一个全局与局部搜索的框架中继续进行。我们在一系列合成函数上验证了我们方法的性能，并在一个真实的化学设计任务上展示了其实用性，其中使用专家假设显著加速了搜索性能。

HypBO: 专家引导化学家参与贝叶斯搜索新材料