Configuring irace using surrogate configuration benchmarks

Over the recent years, several tools for the automated configuration of parameterized algorithms have been developed. These tools, also called configurators, have themselves parameters that influence their search behavior and make them malleable to different kinds of configuration tasks. The default values of these parameters are set manually based on the experience of the configurator's developers. Studying the impact of these parameters or configuring them is very expensive as it would require many executions of these tools on configuration tasks, each taking often many hours or days of computation. In this work, we tackle this problem using a meta-tuning process, based on the use of surrogate benchmarks that are much faster to evaluate. This paper studies the feasibility of this process using the popular irace configurator as the method to be meta-configured. We first study the consistency between the real and surrogate benchmarks using three measures: the prediction accuracy of the surrogate models, the homogeneity of the benchmarks and the list of important algorithm parameters. Afterwards, we use irace to configure irace on those surrogates. Experimental results indicate the feasibility of this process and a clear potential improvement of irace over its default configuration.