Cost-Sensitive Freeze-thaw Bayesian Optimization for Efficient Hyperparameter Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Dong Bok, Zhang, Aoxuan Silvia, Kim, Byungjoo, Park, Junhyeon, Adriaensen, Steven, Lee, Juho, Hwang, Sung Ju, Lee, Hae Beom
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lee, Dong Bok
Zhang, Aoxuan Silvia
Kim, Byungjoo
Park, Junhyeon
Adriaensen, Steven
Lee, Juho
Hwang, Sung Ju
Lee, Hae Beom
author_facet Lee, Dong Bok
Zhang, Aoxuan Silvia
Kim, Byungjoo
Park, Junhyeon
Adriaensen, Steven
Lee, Juho
Hwang, Sung Ju
Lee, Hae Beom
contents In this paper, we address the problem of \emph{cost-sensitive} hyperparameter optimization (HPO) built upon freeze-thaw Bayesian optimization (BO). Specifically, we assume a scenario where users want to early-stop the HPO process when the expected performance improvement is not satisfactory with respect to the additional computational cost. Motivated by this scenario, we introduce \emph{utility} in the freeze-thaw framework, a function describing the trade-off between the cost and performance that can be estimated from the user's preference data. This utility function, combined with our novel acquisition function and stopping criterion, allows us to dynamically continue training the configuration that we expect to maximally improve the utility in the future, and also automatically stop the HPO process around the maximum utility. Further, we improve the sample efficiency of existing freeze-thaw methods with transfer learning to develop a specialized surrogate model for the cost-sensitive HPO problem. We validate our algorithm on established multi-fidelity HPO benchmarks and show that it outperforms all the previous freeze-thaw BO and transfer-BO baselines we consider, while achieving a significantly better trade-off between the cost and performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/db-Lee/CFBO.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_21379
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cost-Sensitive Freeze-thaw Bayesian Optimization for Efficient Hyperparameter Tuning
Lee, Dong Bok
Zhang, Aoxuan Silvia
Kim, Byungjoo
Park, Junhyeon
Adriaensen, Steven
Lee, Juho
Hwang, Sung Ju
Lee, Hae Beom
Machine Learning
In this paper, we address the problem of \emph{cost-sensitive} hyperparameter optimization (HPO) built upon freeze-thaw Bayesian optimization (BO). Specifically, we assume a scenario where users want to early-stop the HPO process when the expected performance improvement is not satisfactory with respect to the additional computational cost. Motivated by this scenario, we introduce \emph{utility} in the freeze-thaw framework, a function describing the trade-off between the cost and performance that can be estimated from the user's preference data. This utility function, combined with our novel acquisition function and stopping criterion, allows us to dynamically continue training the configuration that we expect to maximally improve the utility in the future, and also automatically stop the HPO process around the maximum utility. Further, we improve the sample efficiency of existing freeze-thaw methods with transfer learning to develop a specialized surrogate model for the cost-sensitive HPO problem. We validate our algorithm on established multi-fidelity HPO benchmarks and show that it outperforms all the previous freeze-thaw BO and transfer-BO baselines we consider, while achieving a significantly better trade-off between the cost and performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/db-Lee/CFBO.
title Cost-Sensitive Freeze-thaw Bayesian Optimization for Efficient Hyperparameter Tuning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21379