First, the covariance matrix adaptation (CMA) with rankone update is introduced into the (1+1)-evolution strategy. An improved implementation of the 1/5-th success rule is proposed for step size adaptation, which replaces cumulative path length control. Second, an incremental Cholesky update for the covariance matrix is developed replacing the computational demanding and numerically involved decomposition of the covariance matrix. The Cholesky update can replace the decomposition only for the update without evolution path and reduces the computational effort from O(n 3 ) to O(n 2 ). The resulting (1+1)-Cholesky-CMA-ES is an elegant algorithm and the perhaps simplest evolution strategy with covariance matrix and step size adaptation. Simulations compare the introduced algorithms to previously published CMA versions.
Randomized direct search algorithms for continuous domains, such as evolution strategies, are basic tools in machine learning. They are especially needed when the gradient of an objective function (e.g., loss, energy, or reward function) cannot be computed or estimated efficiently. Application areas include supervised and reinforcement learning as well as model selection. These randomized search strategies often rely on normally distributed additive variations of candidate solutions. In order to efficiently search in non-separable and ill-conditioned landscapes the covariance matrix of the normal distribution must be adapted, amounting to a variable metric method. Consequently, covariance matrix adaptation (CMA) is considered state-of-the-art in evolution strategies. In order to sample the normal distribution, the adapted covariance matrix needs to be decomposed, requiring in general (n 3 ) operations, where n is the search space dimension. We propose a new update mechanism which can replace a rank-one covariance matrix update and the computationally expensive decomposition of the covariance matrix. The newly developed update rule reduces the computational complexity of the rank-one covariance matrix adaptation to (n 2 ) without resorting to outdated distributions. We derive new versions of the elitist covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) and the multi-objective CMA-ES. These algorithms are equivalent to the original procedures except that the update step for the variable metric distribution scales better in the problem dimension. We also introduce a simplified variant of the non-elitist CMA-ES with the incremental covariance matrix update and investigate its performance. Apart from the reduced time-complexity of the distribution update, the algebraic computations involved in all new algorithms are simpler compared to the original Learn (2009) 75: 167-197 versions. The new update rule improves the performance of the CMA-ES for large scale machine learning problems in which the objective function can be evaluated fast.
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