17–22 May 2026
C.I.D
Europe/Zurich timezone

Sample Efficient Machine Learning with Physics-Informed Kernel Methods and Sampling Techniques

WEP6169
20 May 2026, 16:00
2h
C.I.D

C.I.D

Deauville, France
Poster Presentation MC6.T33: Online Modelling and Software Tools Poster session

Speaker

Shaun Preston (John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science, Diamond Light Source, University of Oxford)

Description

It is desirable to reduce the convergence time of optimisers used by large accelerator facilities to maximise user time. A popular technique is Bayesian optimisation which typically use Gaussian Processes (GP) to construct a surrogate of the real machine response to decision variables. GPs belong to a class of algorithms called kernel methods that assign pairwise similarities to all data points with a kernel function. While well-suited to tasks like injection, the kernel matrix must be stored and inverted at inference time, incurring a $O(N^3)$ time-complexity and limiting datasets to a few thousand examples in practice. The modeller is free to design the kernel, subject to some mild regularity conditions. We investigate whether modifications made to the kernel structure, informed by the physics of our problems, can improve sample efficiency. Thompson sampling (TS) is also investigated as a stochastic alternative to deterministic acquisition functions like Upper Confidence Bound and Expected Improvement in an effort to improve convergence.

In which format do you inted to submit your paper? LaTeX

Author

Shaun Preston (John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science, Diamond Light Source, University of Oxford)

Co-authors

Ian Martin (Diamond Light Source, John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science) Philip Burrows (John Adams Institute)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.