Topic Modelling Black Box Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Akramov, Roman, Khamatullin, Artem, Glazyrina, Svetlana, Kryzhanovskiy, Maksim, Ischenko, Roman
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Akramov, Roman
Khamatullin, Artem
Glazyrina, Svetlana
Kryzhanovskiy, Maksim
Ischenko, Roman
author_facet Akramov, Roman
Khamatullin, Artem
Glazyrina, Svetlana
Kryzhanovskiy, Maksim
Ischenko, Roman
contents Choosing the number of topics $T$ in Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a key design decision that strongly affects both the statistical fit and interpretability of topic models. In this work, we formulate the selection of $T$ as a discrete black-box optimization problem, where each function evaluation corresponds to training an LDA model and measuring its validation perplexity. Under a fixed evaluation budget, we compare four families of optimizers: two hand-designed evolutionary methods - Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Evolution Strategy (ES) - and two learned, amortized approaches, Preferential Amortized Black-Box Optimization (PABBO) and Sharpness-Aware Black-Box Optimization (SABBO). Our experiments show that, while GA, ES, PABBO, and SABBO eventually reach a similar band of final perplexity, the amortized optimizers are substantially more sample- and time-efficient. SABBO typically identifies a near-optimal topic number after essentially a single evaluation, and PABBO finds competitive configurations within a few evaluations, whereas GA and ES require almost the full budget to approach the same region.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_16445
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Topic Modelling Black Box Optimization
Akramov, Roman
Khamatullin, Artem
Glazyrina, Svetlana
Kryzhanovskiy, Maksim
Ischenko, Roman
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Choosing the number of topics $T$ in Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a key design decision that strongly affects both the statistical fit and interpretability of topic models. In this work, we formulate the selection of $T$ as a discrete black-box optimization problem, where each function evaluation corresponds to training an LDA model and measuring its validation perplexity. Under a fixed evaluation budget, we compare four families of optimizers: two hand-designed evolutionary methods - Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Evolution Strategy (ES) - and two learned, amortized approaches, Preferential Amortized Black-Box Optimization (PABBO) and Sharpness-Aware Black-Box Optimization (SABBO). Our experiments show that, while GA, ES, PABBO, and SABBO eventually reach a similar band of final perplexity, the amortized optimizers are substantially more sample- and time-efficient. SABBO typically identifies a near-optimal topic number after essentially a single evaluation, and PABBO finds competitive configurations within a few evaluations, whereas GA and ES require almost the full budget to approach the same region.
title Topic Modelling Black Box Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16445