Boosting Offline Optimizers with Surrogate Sensitivity
Offline optimization of expensive black-box functions in materials engineering suffers from poor robustness due to the high sensitivity of surrogate models to parameter perturbations. Method: We propose, for the first time, an optimizable surrogate sensitivity metric and design a sensitivity-aware regularization method orthogonal to existing frameworks. This approach integrates gradient-based sensitivity analysis with deep-learning-based surrogate modeling and is compatible with mainstream paradigms such as offline Bayesian optimization. Contribution/Results: Evaluated on multiple materials design benchmarks, our method significantly improves optimization success rate (average gain of +23.6%) and solution quality (objective value improvement up to 17.4%). Empirical results demonstrate that explicit sensitivity control delivers critical performance gains for offline optimization of expensive black-box functions in materials engineering.