Mind the Gap: Measuring Generalization Performance Across Multiple Objectives

Modern machine learning models are often constructed taking into account multiple objectives, e.g., to minimize inference time while also maximizing accuracy. Multi-objective hyperparameter optimization (MHPO) algorithms return such candidate models and the approximation of the Pareto front is used to assess their performance. However, when estimating generalization performance of an approximation of a Pareto front found on a validation set by computing the performance of the individual models on the test set, models might no longer be Pareto-optimal. This makes it unclear how to measure performance. To resolve this, we provide a novel evaluation protocol that allows measuring the generalization performance of MHPO methods and to study its capabilities for comparing two optimization experiments.