Paper ID: 2405.01226

Avoiding Redundant Restarts in Multimodal Global Optimization

Jacob de Nobel, Diederick Vermetten, Anna V. Kononova, Ofer M. Shir, Thomas Bäck

Na\"ive restarts of global optimization solvers when operating on multimodal search landscapes may resemble the Coupon's Collector Problem, with a potential to waste significant function evaluations budget on revisiting the same basins of attractions. In this paper, we assess the degree to which such ``duplicate restarts'' occur on standard multimodal benchmark functions, which defines the \textit{redundancy potential} of each particular landscape. We then propose a repelling mechanism to avoid such wasted restarts with the CMA-ES and investigate its efficacy on test cases with high redundancy potential compared to the standard restart mechanism.

Submitted: May 2, 2024