Efficient Hyperparameter Optimization with Adaptive Fidelity Identification

Hyperparameter Optimization and Neural Architecture Search are powerful in attaining state-of-the-art machine learning models, with Bayesian Optimization (BO) standing out as a mainstream method. Extending BO into the multi-fidelity setting has been an emerging research topic in this field, but faces the challenge of determining an appropriate fidelity for each hyperparameter configuration to fit the surrogate model. To tackle the challenge, we propose a multi-fidelity BO method named FastBO, which excels in adaptively deciding the fidelity for each configuration and providing strong performance while ensuring efficient resource usage. These advantages are achieved through our proposed techniques based on the concepts of efficient point and saturation point for each configuration, which can be obtained from the empirical learning curve of the configuration, estimated from early observations. Extensive experiments demonstrate FastBO's superior anytime performance and efficiency in identifying high-quality configurations and architectures. We also show that our method provides a way to extend any single-fidelity method to the multi-fidelity setting, highlighting the wide applicability of our approach.