Toward Automated Algorithm Design: A Survey and Practical Guide to Meta-Black-Box-Optimization
This is an incremental contribution that provides a systematic review and practical guide for researchers in evolutionary computation and automated algorithm design.
This survey addresses the lack of comprehensive summaries and practical guidance for Meta-Black-Box-Optimization (MetaBBO), an emerging field combining meta-learning with evolutionary computation for automated algorithm design, by providing a unified definition, taxonomy, evaluation of methods, and identification of core designs to enhance generalization and learning effectiveness.
In this survey, we introduce Meta-Black-Box-Optimization~(MetaBBO) as an emerging avenue within the Evolutionary Computation~(EC) community, which incorporates Meta-learning approaches to assist automated algorithm design. Despite the success of MetaBBO, the current literature provides insufficient summaries of its key aspects and lacks practical guidance for implementation. To bridge this gap, we offer a comprehensive review of recent advances in MetaBBO, providing an in-depth examination of its key developments. We begin with a unified definition of the MetaBBO paradigm, followed by a systematic taxonomy of various algorithm design tasks, including algorithm selection, algorithm configuration, solution manipulation, and algorithm generation. Further, we conceptually summarize different learning methodologies behind current MetaBBO works, including reinforcement learning, supervised learning, neuroevolution, and in-context learning with Large Language Models. A comprehensive evaluation of the latest representative MetaBBO methods is then carried out, alongside an experimental analysis of their optimization performance, computational efficiency, and generalization ability. Based on the evaluation results, we meticulously identify a set of core designs that enhance the generalization and learning effectiveness of MetaBBO. Finally, we outline the vision for the field by providing insight into the latest trends and potential future directions. Relevant literature will be continuously collected and updated at https://github.com/MetaEvo/Awesome-MetaBBO.