Non-Elitist Selection Can Improve the Performance of Irace

TL;DR

This paper proposes non-elitist selection methods for irace, which improve algorithm configuration performance and diversity, leading to better solutions in combinatorial optimization problems.

Contribution

It introduces alternative selection strategies for irace that enhance diversity and performance in automated algorithm configuration.

Findings

Non-elitist methods outperform default irace selection on benchmarks.

Diverse configurations help understand algorithm behavior.

Improved tuning results for TSP, QAP, and SAT solvers.

Abstract

Modern optimization strategies such as evolutionary algorithms, ant colony algorithms, Bayesian optimization techniques, etc. come with several parameters that steer their behavior during the optimization process. To obtain high-performing algorithm instances, automated algorithm configuration techniques have been developed. One of the most popular tools is irace, which evaluates configurations in sequential races, making use of iterated statistical tests to discard poorly performing configurations. At the end of the race, a set of elite configurations are selected from those survivor configurations that were not discarded, using greedy truncation selection. We study two alternative selection methods: one keeps the best survivor and selects the remaining configurations uniformly at random from the set of survivors, while the other applies entropy to maximize the diversity of the elites. These methods are tested for tuning ant colony optimization algorithms for traveling salesperson problems and the quadratic assignment problem and tuning an exact tree search solver for satisfiability problems. The experimental results show improvement on the tested benchmarks compared to the default selection of irace. In addition, the obtained results indicate that non-elitist can obtain diverse algorithm configurations, which encourages us to explore a wider range of solutions to understand the behavior of algorithms.