GUIDE-FBO: Guidance via Uncertainty Intervention and Distributional Exchange for Federated Bayesian Optimization
Abstract
Federated Bayesian Optimization (FBO) enables distributed agents to collaboratively optimize expensive black-box objectives without sharing raw local observations. However, effective knowledge transfer remains challenging under communication constraints and task heterogeneity. We propose GUIDE-FBO, in which agents exchange compact distributions over the locations of their respective optima inferred from local Gaussian process (GP) posteriors, rather than raw observations, query points, or surrogate parameters. The server merges and reweights these distributional components before returning a subset to each agent. Each agent then constructs a Federated Interventional GP (FI-GP), which preserves the local posterior mean and spatially rescales its covariance for local decision making. For the upper confidence bound (UCB) instantiation, GUIDE-UCB, we prove that any bounded FI-GP uncertainty intervention preserves the leading-order cumulative regret rate of standard GP-UCB. When the transferred distributions place greater support near an optimum than in a suboptimal region, selecting the latter requires greater local posterior uncertainty. Experiments on 12 synthetic benchmarks and three real-world optimization tasks show that GUIDE-FBO remains effective across settings ranging from homogeneous to severely heterogeneous. Ablation results highlight the importance of spatially localized uncertainty intervention, while the communication analysis shows that GUIDE-FBO exchanges only compact distributional messages.
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BibTeX
@misc{wei2026guidefbo,
title = {{GUIDE-FBO: Guidance via Uncertainty Intervention and Distributional Exchange for Federated Bayesian Optimization}},
author = {Jintao Wei and Chenxi Li and Songhao Wang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.35038},
eprint = {2609.35038},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35038},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - GUIDE-FBO: Guidance via Uncertainty Intervention and Distributional Exchange for Federated Bayesian Optimization
AU - Jintao Wei
AU - Chenxi Li
AU - Songhao Wang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.35038
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35038
AB - Federated Bayesian Optimization (FBO) enables distributed agents to collaboratively optimize expensive black-box objectives without sharing raw local observations. However, effective knowledge transfer remains challenging under communication constraints and task heterogeneity. We propose GUIDE-FBO, in which agents exchange compact distributions over the locations of their respective optima inferred from local Gaussian process (GP) posteriors, rather than raw observations, query points, or surrogate parameters. The server merges and reweights these distributional components before returning a subset to each agent. Each agent then constructs a Federated Interventional GP (FI-GP), which preserves the local posterior mean and spatially rescales its covariance for local decision making. For the upper confidence bound (UCB) instantiation, GUIDE-UCB, we prove that any bounded FI-GP uncertainty intervention preserves the leading-order cumulative regret rate of standard GP-UCB. When the transferred distributions place greater support near an optimum than in a suboptimal region, selecting the latter requires greater local posterior uncertainty. Experiments on 12 synthetic benchmarks and three real-world optimization tasks show that GUIDE-FBO remains effective across settings ranging from homogeneous to severely heterogeneous. Ablation results highlight the importance of spatially localized uncertainty intervention, while the communication analysis shows that GUIDE-FBO exchanges only compact distributional messages.
ER -