c-TPE: Tree-structured Parzen Estimator with Inequality Constraints for Expensive Hyperparameter Optimization

c-TPE: Tree-structured Parzen Estimator with Inequality Constraints for Expensive Hyperparameter Optimization

Shuhei Watanabe, Frank Hutter

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4371-4379. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/486

Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is crucial for strong performance of deep learning algorithms and real-world applications often impose some constraints, such as memory usage, or latency on top of the performance requirement. In this work, we propose constrained TPE (c-TPE), an extension of the widely-used versatile Bayesian optimization method, tree-structured Parzen estimator (TPE), to handle these constraints. Our proposed extension goes beyond a simple combination of an existing acquisition function and the original TPE, and instead includes modifications that address issues that cause poor performance. We thoroughly analyze these modifications both empirically and theoretically, providing insights into how they effectively overcome these challenges. In the experiments, we demonstrate that c-TPE exhibits the best average rank performance among existing methods with statistical significance on 81 expensive HPO with inequality constraints. Due to the lack of baselines, we only discuss the applicability of our method to hard-constrained optimization in Appendix D. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14411 for the latest version with Appendix.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Hyperparameter optimization
Machine Learning: ML: Automated machine learning