Paper ID: 2212.00333

AC-Band: A Combinatorial Bandit-Based Approach to Algorithm Configuration

Jasmin Brandt, Elias Schede, Viktor Bengs, Björn Haddenhorst, Eyke Hüllermeier, Kevin Tierney

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.

Submitted: Dec 1, 2022