Adaptive Multi Mode: Budget-Aware Routing of Optimizers By Online Landscape Probes

Benjamin Jacob Bodner

The best classical optimizer for a continuous black-box problem depends on its budget and landscape. Existing routers decide from the dimension and budget, past improvement or features fitted to one benchmark, and few test an optimizer's implicit assumptions online. AMM (Adaptive Multi Mode) routes a known budget among quasi-Newton, trust-region, coordinate, multistart and evolution-strategy optimization engines with online probes of curvature, plateaus, separability, kinks, basins and fractal structure. Each probe has a default, a dimension-by-budget validity range and a cost charged to the budget. In its pre-registered development loop on bbob, 32 of 36 predictions held over the last 16 confirmations. AMM was then tested once on held-out bbob instances 101-110 (D=2-40, 10*D-1000*D) against up to seven competitors. It has the highest target share in 382 of 600 function-dimension-budget cells (236 outright, 146 tied) and, by a descriptive posterior rule, is credibly behind in 35, mostly at 10*D and 30*D. At every budget it also leads the controls built from its own engines (the best engine alone, the best engine per dimension and budget, and a greedy schedule), narrowly at 10*D…