The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is widely
accepted as a robust derivative-free continuous optimization algorithm for
non-linear and non-convex optimization problems. CMA-ES is well known to be
almost parameterless, meaning that only one hyper-parameter, the population
size, is proposed to be tuned by the user. In this paper, we propose a
principled approach called self-CMA-ES to achieve the online adaptation of
CMA-ES hyper-parameters in order to improve its overall performance.
Experimental results show that for larger-than-default population size, the
default settings of hyper-parameters of CMA-ES are far from being optimal, and
that self-CMA-ES allows for dynamically approaching optimal settings.Comment: 13th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature
(PPSN 2014) (2014
