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.
@article{arxiv.2212.00333,
title = {AC-Band: A Combinatorial Bandit-Based Approach to Algorithm Configuration},
author = {Jasmin Brandt and Elias Schede and Viktor Bengs and Björn Haddenhorst and Eyke Hüllermeier and Kevin Tierney},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.00333},
year = {2022}
}