# How to Assess Step-Size Adaptation Mechanisms in Randomised Search

1 TAO - Machine Learning and Optimisation
CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique : UMR8623, Inria Saclay - Ile de France, UP11 - Université Paris-Sud - Paris 11, LRI - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique
Abstract : Step-size adaptation for randomised search algorithms like evolution strategies is a crucial feature for their performance. The adaptation must, depending on the situation, sustain a large diversity or entertain fast convergence to the desired optimum. The assessment of step-size adaptation mechanisms is therefore non-trivial and often done in too restricted scenarios, possibly only on the sphere function. This paper introduces a (minimal) methodology combined with a practical procedure to conduct a more thorough assessment of the overall population diversity of a randomised search algorithm in different scenarios. We illustrate the methodology on evolution strategies with $\sigma$-self-adaptation, cumulative step-size adaptation and two-point adaptation. For the latter, we introduce a variant that abstains from additional samples by constructing two particular individuals within the given population to decide on the step-size change. We find that results on the sphere function alone can be rather misleading to assess mechanisms to control overall population diversity. We observed the most striking flaws for self-adaptation: on the linear function, the step-size increments are rather small, and on a moderately conditioned ellipsoid function, the adapted step-size is 20 times smaller than optimal.
Document type :
Conference papers

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00997294
Contributor : Nikolaus Hansen <>
Submitted on : Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - 5:41:26 PM
Last modification on : Wednesday, September 16, 2020 - 5:09:04 PM
Long-term archiving on: : Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - 10:36:30 AM

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ppsn2014assess.pdf
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• HAL Id : hal-00997294, version 2

### Citation

Nikolaus Hansen, Asma Atamna, Anne Auger. How to Assess Step-Size Adaptation Mechanisms in Randomised Search. Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN XIII, Sep 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia. pp.60-69. ⟨hal-00997294v2⟩

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