PhD defence
Sampling Strategies in Automated Algorithm Configuration
- M.I.A. Anastacio
- Date
- Tuesday 23 June 2026
- Time
- Address
-
Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden
Supervisor(s)
Summary
When confronted with complex real-world problems, the first step is often to express them mathematically to make them accessible to a multitude of tools that can potentially be used for solving them. Among those mathematical representations comes one dreaded family: the NP-hard problems. Thus came heuristic methods: through approximations and trial and error, they can often solve NP-hard problems, even large ones, within an acceptable timeframe. These come with various parameters corresponding to switches and knobs one can play with until the fastest path to a solution is found, which can make the difference between solving a problem in minutes, hours, or weeks.
To optimise the performance of such algorithms by setting the values of their parameters is an optimisation problem known as the automated algorithm configuration problem. Optimisation methods based on various paradigms — such as evolutionary algorithms, racing, and Bayesian optimisation — have provided the bases for configuring the inner workings of algorithms from various fields of application. Those configurators, more specifically their strategies to sample parameter values and problem instances, are the main topic of study in the present thesis.
In particular, we are interested in their application to reduce the running time of solvers for NP-hard problems. We evaluated several methods to sample both new values of parameters and new instances on which to test them based on prior information either from the developer or from the data gathered so far. We showed that better leveraging this information allows the configurators to be more efficient.
PhD dissertations
Approximately one week after the defence, PhD dissertations by Leiden PhD students are available digitally through the Leiden Repository, that offers free access to these PhD dissertations. Please note that in some cases a dissertation may be under embargo temporarily and access to its full-text version will only be granted later.
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