Neural Exploratory Landscape Analysis for Meta-Black-Box-Optimization

Zeyuan Ma, Jiacheng Chen, Hongshu Guo, Yue-Jiao Gong

Keywords: Landscape Analysis, Black-Box Optimization, Meta-Black-Box-Optimization, Learning to Optimize

TL;DR: A leanable neural netwok-based landscape analysis framework tailored for Meta-Black-Box Optimization methods.

Abstract: Recent research in Meta-Black-Box-Optimization (MetaBBO) have shown that meta-trained neural networks can effectively guide the design of black-box optimizers, significantly reducing the need for expert tuning and delivering robust performance across complex problem distributions. Despite their success, a paradox remains: MetaBBO still rely on human-crafted Exploratory Landscape Analysis features to inform the meta-level agent about the low-level optimization progress. To address the gap, this paper proposes Neural Exploratory Landscape Analysis (NeurELA), a novel framework that dynamically profiles landscape features through a two-stage, attention-based neural network, executed in an entirely end-to-end fashion. NeurELA is pre-trained over a variety of MetaBBO algorithms using a multi-task neuroevolution strategy. Extensive experiments show that NeurELA achieves consistently superior performance when integrated into different and even unseen MetaBBO tasks and can be efficiently fine-tuned for further performance boost. This advancement marks a pivotal step in making MetaBBO algorithms more autonomous and broadly applicable. The source code of NeurELA can be accessed at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Neur-ELA-303C.

Primary Area: optimization

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Submission Number: 5530