Sampling in CMA-ES: Low Numbers of Low Discrepancy Points

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: de Nobel, Jacob, Vermetten, Diederick, Bäck, Thomas H. W., Kononova, Anna V.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author de Nobel, Jacob
Vermetten, Diederick
Bäck, Thomas H. W.
Kononova, Anna V.
author_facet de Nobel, Jacob
Vermetten, Diederick
Bäck, Thomas H. W.
Kononova, Anna V.
contents The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is one of the most successful examples of a derandomized evolution strategy. However, it still relies on randomly sampling offspring, which can be done via a uniform distribution and subsequently transforming into the required Gaussian. Previous work has shown that replacing this uniform sampling with a low-discrepancy sampler, such as Halton or Sobol sequences, can improve performance over a wide set of problems. We show that iterating through small, fixed sets of low-discrepancy points can still perform better than the default uniform distribution. Moreover, using only 128 points throughout the search is sufficient to closely approximate the empirical performance of using the complete pseudorandom sequence up to dimensionality 40 on the BBOB benchmark. For lower dimensionalities (below 10), we find that using as little as 32 unique low discrepancy points performs similar or better than uniform sampling. In 2D, for which we have highly optimized low discrepancy samples available, we demonstrate that using these points yields the highest empirical performance and requires only 16 samples to improve over uniform sampling. Overall, we establish a clear relation between the $L_2$ discrepancy of the used point set and the empirical performance of the CMA-ES.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_15941
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sampling in CMA-ES: Low Numbers of Low Discrepancy Points
de Nobel, Jacob
Vermetten, Diederick
Bäck, Thomas H. W.
Kononova, Anna V.
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is one of the most successful examples of a derandomized evolution strategy. However, it still relies on randomly sampling offspring, which can be done via a uniform distribution and subsequently transforming into the required Gaussian. Previous work has shown that replacing this uniform sampling with a low-discrepancy sampler, such as Halton or Sobol sequences, can improve performance over a wide set of problems. We show that iterating through small, fixed sets of low-discrepancy points can still perform better than the default uniform distribution. Moreover, using only 128 points throughout the search is sufficient to closely approximate the empirical performance of using the complete pseudorandom sequence up to dimensionality 40 on the BBOB benchmark. For lower dimensionalities (below 10), we find that using as little as 32 unique low discrepancy points performs similar or better than uniform sampling. In 2D, for which we have highly optimized low discrepancy samples available, we demonstrate that using these points yields the highest empirical performance and requires only 16 samples to improve over uniform sampling. Overall, we establish a clear relation between the $L_2$ discrepancy of the used point set and the empirical performance of the CMA-ES.
title Sampling in CMA-ES: Low Numbers of Low Discrepancy Points
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15941