# GUIDE-FBO: Guidance via Uncertainty Intervention and Distributional Exchange for Federated Bayesian Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35038 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35038/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [On Kernelized Multi-armed Bandits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00445/) (2017)
- [COCO: A Platform for Comparing Continuous Optimizers in a Black-Box Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08785/) (2016)
- [Constrained Bayesian Optimization with Noisy Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07094/) (2017)
- [Orthogonal Random Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09072/) (2016)
- [Federated Bayesian Optimization via Thompson Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10154/) (2020)
- [Recent Advances in Bayesian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03301/) (2022)
- [Federated Hyperparameter Tuning: Challenges, Baselines, and Connections to Weight-Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04502/) (2021)
- [Differentially Private Federated Bayesian Optimization with Distributed Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14153/) (2021)
- [Automatic LQR Tuning Based on Gaussian Process Global Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.01950/) (2016)
- [Collaborative and Distributed Bayesian Optimization via Consensus: Showcasing the Power of Collaboration for Optimal Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14348/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Bayesian Optimization via Wasserstein Barycenters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10770/) (2025)
- [Collaborative and Federated Black-box Optimization: A Bayesian Optimization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07523/) (2024)
- [Bayesian Optimization for Personalized Dose-Finding Trials with Combination Therapies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17334/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.