Auto-nnU-Net: Towards Automated Medical Image Segmentation

Medical Image Segmentation (MIS) includes diverse tasks, from bone to organ segmentation, each with its own challenges in finding the best segmentation model. The state-of-the-art AutoML-related MIS-framework nnU-Net automates many aspects of model configuration but remains constrained by fixed hyperparameters and heuristic design choices. As a full-AutoML framework for MIS, we propose Auto-nnU-Net, a novel nnU-Net variant enabling hyperparameter optimization (HPO), neural architecture search (NAS), and hierarchical NAS (HNAS). Additionally, we propose Regularized PriorBand to balance model accuracy with the computational resources required for training, addressing the resource constraints often faced in real-world medical settings that limit the feasibility of extensive training procedures. We evaluate our approach across diverse MIS datasets from the well-established Medical Segmentation Decathlon, analyzing the impact of AutoML techniques on segmentation performance, computational efficiency, and model design choices. The results demonstrate that our AutoML approach substantially improves the segmentation performance of nnU-Net on 6 out of 10 datasets and is on par on the other datasets while maintaining practical resource requirements. Our code is available at https://github.com/LUH-AI/AutonnUNet.

ARLBench: Flexible and Efficient Benchmarking for Hyperparameter Optimization in Reinforcement Learning

Hyperparameters are a critical factor in reliably training well-performing reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Unfortunately, developing and evaluating automated approaches for tuning such hyperparameters is both costly and time-consuming. As a result, such approaches are often only evaluated on a single domain or algorithm, making comparisons difficult and limiting insights into their generalizability. We propose ARLBench, a benchmark for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) in RL that allows comparisons of diverse HPO approaches while being highly efficient in evaluation. To enable research into HPO in RL, even in settings with low compute resources, we select a representative subset of HPO tasks spanning a variety of algorithm and environment combinations. This selection allows for generating a performance profile of an automated RL (AutoRL) method using only a fraction of the compute previously necessary, enabling a broader range of researchers to work on HPO in RL. With the extensive and large-scale dataset on hyperparameter landscapes that our selection is based on, ARLBench is an efficient, flexible, and future-oriented foundation for research on AutoRL. Both the benchmark and the dataset are available at https://github.com/automl/arlbench.