Related papers: Maximizing Drift is Not Optimal for Solving OneMax
The OneMax problem, alternatively known as the Hamming distance problem, is often referred to as the "drosophila of evolutionary computation (EC)", because of its high relevance in theoretical and empirical analyses of EC approaches. It is…
It has been observed that some working principles of evolutionary algorithms, in particular, the influence of the parameters, cannot be understood from results on the asymptotic order of the runtime, but only from more precise results. In…
We propose and analyze a self-adaptive version of the $(1,\lambda)$ evolutionary algorithm in which the current mutation rate is part of the individual and thus also subject to mutation. A rigorous runtime analysis on the OneMax benchmark…
It is generally accepted that populations are useful for the global exploration of multi-modal optimisation problems. Indeed, several theoretical results are available showing such advantages over single-trajectory search heuristics. In…
In this work, we introduce multiplicative drift analysis as a suitable way to analyze the runtime of randomized search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms. We give a multiplicative version of the classical drift theorem. This allows…
In a seminal paper in 2013, Witt showed that the (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm with standard bit mutation needs time $(1+o(1))n \ln n/p_1$ to find the optimum of any linear function, as long as the probability $p_1$ to flip exactly one bit…
Most research in the theory of evolutionary computation assumes that the problem at hand has a fixed problem size. This assumption does not always apply to real-world optimization challenges, where the length of an optimal solution may be…
We study how Reinforcement Learning can be employed to optimally control parameters in evolutionary algorithms. We control the mutation probability of a (1+1) evolutionary algorithm on the OneMax function. This problem is modeled as a…
We propose a new way to self-adjust the mutation rate in population-based evolutionary algorithms in discrete search spaces. Roughly speaking, it consists of creating half the offspring with a mutation rate that is twice the current…
The analysis of randomized search heuristics on classes of functions is fundamental for the understanding of the underlying stochastic process and the development of suitable proof techniques. Recently, remarkable progress has been made in…
We show that, for any c>0, the (1+1) evolutionary algorithm using an arbitrary mutation rate p_n = c/n finds the optimum of a linear objective function over bit strings of length n in expected time Theta(n log n). Previously, this was only…
In real-world applications, many optimization problems have the time-linkage property, that is, the objective function value relies on the current solution as well as the historical solutions. Although the rigorous theoretical analysis on…
Most evolutionary algorithms have parameters, which allow a great flexibility in controlling their behavior and adapting them to new problems. To achieve the best performance, it is often needed to control some of the parameters during…
Black-box complexity studies lower bounds for the efficiency of general-purpose black-box optimization algorithms such as evolutionary algorithms and other search heuristics. Different models exist, each one being designed to analyze a…
We present a new method for proving lower bounds on the expected running time of evolutionary algorithms. It is based on fitness-level partitions and an additional condition on transition probabilities between fitness levels. The method is…
Drift analysis has become a powerful tool to prove bounds on the runtime of randomized search heuristics. It allows, for example, fairly simple proofs for the classical problem how the (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) optimizes an…
A core feature of evolutionary algorithms is their mutation operator. Recently, much attention has been devoted to the study of mutation operators with dynamic and non-uniform mutation rates. Following up on this line of work, we propose a…
Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and other randomized search heuristics are often considered as unbiased algorithms that are invariant with respect to different transformations of the underlying search space. However, if a certain amount of…
One of the easiest randomized greedy optimization algorithms is the following evolutionary algorithm which aims at maximizing a boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n \to {\mathbb R}$. The algorithm starts with a random search point $\xi \in…
The field of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) often emphasizes its popularity for optimization problems with conflicting objectives. However, it is still theoretically unknown how MOEAs perform compared with typical approaches…