  Many crucial scientific problems involve designing novel molecules with
desired properties, which can be formulated as a black-box optimization problem
over the discrete chemical space. In practice, multiple conflicting objectives
and costly evaluations (e.g., wet-lab experiments) make the diversity of
candidates paramount. Computational methods have achieved initial success but
still struggle with considering diversity in both objective and search space.
To fill this gap, we propose a multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO)
algorithm leveraging the hypernetwork-based GFlowNets (HN-GFN) as an
acquisition function optimizer, with the purpose of sampling a diverse batch of
candidate molecular graphs from an approximate Pareto front. Using a single
preference-conditioned hypernetwork, HN-GFN learns to explore various
trade-offs between objectives. We further propose a hindsight-like off-policy
strategy to share high-performing molecules among different preferences in
order to speed up learning for HN-GFN. We empirically illustrate that HN-GFN
has adequate capacity to generalize over preferences. Moreover, experiments in
various real-world MOBO settings demonstrate that our framework predominantly
outperforms existing methods in terms of candidate quality and sample
efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/violet-sto/HN-GFN.
