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Bayes Optimal Early Stopping Policies for Black-Box Optimization

Machine Learning 2019-02-25 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We derive an optimal policy for adaptively restarting a randomized algorithm, based on observed features of the run-so-far, so as to minimize the expected time required for the algorithm to successfully terminate. Given a suitable Bayesian prior, this result can be used to select the optimal black-box optimization algorithm from among a large family of algorithms that includes random search, Successive Halving, and Hyperband. On CIFAR-10 and ImageNet hyperparameter tuning problems, the proposed policies offer up to a factor of 13 improvement over random search in terms of expected time to reach a given target accuracy, and up to a factor of 3 improvement over a baseline adaptive policy that terminates a run whenever its accuracy is below-median.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.08285,
  title  = {Bayes Optimal Early Stopping Policies for Black-Box Optimization},
  author = {Matthew Streeter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.08285},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:47:42.254Z