EvolutionTuner.rst

Naive Evolution Tuners on NNI
=============================


1. Introduction
---------------

Naive Evolution comes from `Large-Scale Evolution of Image Classifiers <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.01041.pdf>`__. It randomly initializes a population based on the search space. For each generation, it chooses better ones and does some mutation (e.g., changes a hyperparameter, adds/removes one layer, etc.) on them to get the next generation. Naive Evolution requires many trials to works but it's very simple and it's easily expanded with new features.

2. Usage
--------

classArgs Requirements
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* 
  **optimize_mode** (*maximize or minimize, optional, default = maximize*\ ) - If 'maximize', the tuner will try to maximize metrics. If 'minimize', the tuner will try to minimize metrics.

* 
  **population_size** (*int value (should > 0), optional, default = 20*\ ) - the initial size of the population (trial num) in the evolution tuner. It's suggested that ``population_size`` be much larger than ``concurrency`` so users can get the most out of the algorithm (and at least ``concurrency``\ , or the tuner will fail on its first generation of parameters).

Example Configuration
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

.. code-block:: yaml

   # config.yml
   tuner:
     builtinTunerName: Evolution
     classArgs:
       optimize_mode: maximize
       population_size: 100