Human-in-the-Loop Meta Bayesian Optimization for Fusion Energy and Scientific Applications

Human-in-the-Loop Meta Bayesian Optimization for Fusion Energy and Scientific Applications

Ricardo Luna Gutierrez, Sahand Ghorbanpour, Rahman Ejaz, Varchas Gopalaswamy, Riccardo Betti, Vineet Gundecha, Aarne Lees, Soumyendu Sarkar

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI and Social Good. Pages 7328-7336. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/815

Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) holds transformative promise for sustainable, near-limitless clean energy, yet remains constrained by prohibitively high costs and limited experimental opportunities. This paper presents Human-in-the-Loop Meta Bayesian Optimization (HL-MBO), a framework that integrates expert knowledge with few-shot, uncertainty-aware machine learning to accelerate discovery in data-scarce, high-stakes scientific domains. HL-MBO introduces a meta-learned surrogate model with an expert-informed acquisition function to recommend candidate experiments. To foster trust and enable informed decisions, HL-MBO also provides interpretable explanations of its suggestions. We show that HL-MBO outperforms current BO methods for ICF energy yield optimization, as well as benchmarks in molecular optimization and critical-temperature maximization for superconducting materials.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Machine Learning
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications