Agent-based Collaborative Random Search for Hyper-parameter Tuning and Global Function Optimization
This addresses the tedious problem of hyper-parameter optimization for machine learning practitioners, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing random search techniques.
The paper tackled hyper-parameter tuning and global function optimization by proposing an agent-based collaborative random search method, which outperformed common randomized strategies in classification, regression, and multi-dimensional tasks, especially in high dimensions and with limited computational resources.
Hyper-parameter optimization is one of the most tedious yet crucial steps in training machine learning models. There are numerous methods for this vital model-building stage, ranging from domain-specific manual tuning guidelines suggested by the oracles to the utilization of general-purpose black-box optimization techniques. This paper proposes an agent-based collaborative technique for finding near-optimal values for any arbitrary set of hyper-parameters (or decision variables) in a machine learning model (or general function optimization problem). The developed method forms a hierarchical agent-based architecture for the distribution of the searching operations at different dimensions and employs a cooperative searching procedure based on an adaptive width-based random sampling technique to locate the optima. The behavior of the presented model, specifically against the changes in its design parameters, is investigated in both machine learning and global function optimization applications, and its performance is compared with that of two randomized tuning strategies that are commonly used in practice. According to the empirical results, the proposed model outperformed the compared methods in the experimented classification, regression, and multi-dimensional function optimization tasks, notably in a higher number of dimensions and in the presence of limited on-device computational resources.