Kevin Tierney

Jasmin Brandt, Elias Schede, Viktor Bengs et al.

We study the algorithm configuration (AC) problem, in which one seeks to find an optimal parameter configuration of a given target algorithm in an automated way. Recently, there has been significant progress in designing AC approaches that satisfy strong theoretical guarantees. However, a significant gap still remains between the practical performance of these approaches and state-of-the-art heuristic methods. To this end, we introduce AC-Band, a general approach for the AC problem based on multi-armed bandits that provides theoretical guarantees while exhibiting strong practical performance. We show that AC-Band requires significantly less computation time than other AC approaches providing theoretical guarantees while still yielding high-quality configurations.

Elias Schede, Jasmin Brandt, Alexander Tornede et al.

Algorithm configuration (AC) is concerned with the automated search of the most suitable parameter configuration of a parametrized algorithm. There is currently a wide variety of AC problem variants and methods proposed in the literature. Existing reviews do not take into account all derivatives of the AC problem, nor do they offer a complete classification scheme. To this end, we introduce taxonomies to describe the AC problem and features of configuration methods, respectively. We review existing AC literature within the lens of our taxonomies, outline relevant design choices of configuration approaches, contrast methods and problem variants against each other, and describe the state of AC in industry. Finally, our review provides researchers and practitioners with a look at future research directions in the field of AC.

Carlos Ansotegui, Meinolf Sellmann, Tapan Shah et al.

We consider black-box optimization in which only an extremely limited number of function evaluations, on the order of around 100, are affordable and the function evaluations must be performed in even fewer batches of a limited number of parallel trials. This is a typical scenario when optimizing variable settings that are very costly to evaluate, for example in the context of simulation-based optimization or machine learning hyperparameterization. We propose an original method that uses established approaches to propose a set of points for each batch and then down-selects from these candidate points to the number of trials that can be run in parallel. The key novelty of our approach lies in the introduction of a hyperparameterized method for down-selecting the number of candidates to the allowed batch-size, which is optimized offline using automated algorithm configuration. We tune this method for black box optimization and then evaluate on classical black box optimization benchmarks. Our results show that it is possible to learn how to combine evaluation points suggested by highly diverse black box optimization methods conditioned on the progress of the optimization. Compared with the state of the art in black box minimization and various other methods specifically geared towards few-shot minimization, we achieve an average reduction of 50\% of normalized cost, which is a highly significant improvement in performance.