Code-Aware Cross-Program Transfer Hyperparameter Optimization

Hyperparameter tuning is an essential task in automatic machine learning and big data management. To accelerate tuning, many recent studies focus on augmenting BO, the primary hyperparameter tuning strategy, by transferring information from other tuning tasks. However, existing studies ignore program similarities in their transfer mechanism, thus they are sub-optimal in cross-program transfer when tuning tasks involve different programs. This paper proposes CaTHPO, a code-aware cross-program transfer hyperparameter optimization framework, which makes three improvements. (1) It learns code-aware program representation in a self-supervised manner to give an off-the-shelf estimate of program similarities. (2) It adjusts the surrogate and AF in BO based on program similarities, thus the hyperparameter search is guided by accumulated information across similar programs. (3) It presents a safe controller to dynamically prune undesirable sample points based on tuning experiences of similar programs. Extensive experiments on tuning various recommendation models and Spark applications have demonstrated that CatHPO can steadily obtain better and more robust hyperparameter performances within fewer samples than state-of-the-art competitors.

Authors

• Zijia Wang School of Informatics, Xiamen University
• Xiangyu He School of Informatics, Xiamen University
• Kehan Chen School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences MAIS, Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Chen Lin
• Jinsong Su School of Informatics, Xiamen University, China Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, China Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, China

Keywords

• ML: Auto ML and Hyperparameter Tuning
• ML: Transfer, Domain Adaptation, Multi-Task Learning