Multi-agent Dynamic Algorithm Configuration

Abstract: Automated algorithm configuration relieves users from tedious, trial-and-error tuning tasks. A popular algorithm configuration tuning paradigm is dynamic algorithm configuration (DAC), in which an agent learns dynamic configuration policies across instances by reinforcement learning (RL). However, in many complex algorithms, there may exist different types of configuration hyperparameters, and such heterogeneity may bring difficulties for classic DAC which uses a single-agent RL policy. In this paper, we aim to address this issue and propose multi-agent DAC (MA-DAC), with one agent working for one type of configuration hyperparameter. MA-DAC formulates the dynamic configuration of a complex algorithm with multiple types of hyperparameters as a contextual multi-agent Markov decision process and solves it by a cooperative multi-agent RL (MARL) algorithm. To instantiate, we apply MA-DAC to a well-known optimization algorithm for multi-objective optimization problems. Experimental results show the effectiveness of MA-DAC in not only achieving superior performance compared with other configuration tuning approaches based on heuristic rules, multi-armed bandits, and single-agent RL, but also being capable of generalizing to different problem classes. Furthermore, we release the environments in this paper as a benchmark for testing MARL algorithms, with the hope of facilitating the application of MARL.