Black-box Optimization Benchmarking of NIPOP-aCMA-ES and NBIPOP-aCMA-ES on the BBOB-2012 Noiseless Testbed

In this paper, we study the performance of NIPOP-aCMA-ES and NBIPOP-aCMA-ES, recently proposed alternative restart strategies for CMA-ES. Both algorithms were tested using restarts till a total number of function evaluations of $10^6D$ was reached, where $D$ is the dimension of the function search space. We compared new strategies to CMA-ES with IPOP and BIPOP restart schemes, two algorithms with one of the best overall performance observed during the BBOB-2009 and BBOB-2010. We also present the first benchmarking of BIPOP-CMA-ES with the weighted active covariance matrix update (BIPOP-aCMA-ES). The comparison shows that NIPOP-aCMA-ES usually outperforms IPOP-aCMA-ES and has similar performance with BIPOP-aCMA-ES, using only the regime of increasing the population size. The second strategy, NBIPOP-aCMA-ES, outperforms BIPOP-aCMA-ES in dimension 40 on weakly structured multi-modal functions thanks to the adaptive allocation of computation budgets between the regimes of restarts.