Related papers: Frequency Fitness Assignment: Making Optimization …
Online algorithm selection (OAS) aims to adapt the optimization process to changes in the fitness landscape and is expected to outperform any single algorithm from a given portfolio. Although this expectation is supported by numerous…
It was recently observed that the $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm can comparably easily escape the local optimum of the jump functions benchmark. Consequently, this algorithm can optimize the jump function with jump size $k$ in an…
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…
Extending previous analyses on function classes like linear functions, we analyze how the simple (1+1) evolutionary algorithm optimizes pseudo-Boolean functions that are strictly monotone. Contrary to what one would expect, not all of these…
We analyze the unbiased black-box complexity of jump functions with small, medium, and large sizes of the fitness plateau surrounding the optimal solution. Among other results, we show that when the jump size is $(1/2 - \varepsilon)n$, that…
In contrast to the fixed parameter analysis (FPA), in the variable parameter analysis (VPA) the value of the target problem parameter is not fixed, it rather depends on the structure of a given problem instance and tends to have a favorable…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) form a popular optimisation paradigm inspired by natural evolution. In recent years the field of evolutionary computation has developed a rigorous analytical theory to analyse their runtime on many illustrative…
Recent theoretical research has shown that self-adjusting and self-adaptive mechanisms can provably outperform static settings in evolutionary algorithms for binary search spaces. However, the vast majority of these studies focuses on…
We study unbiased $(1+1)$ evolutionary algorithms on linear functions with an unknown number $n$ of bits with non-zero weight. Static algorithms achieve an optimal runtime of $O(n (\ln n)^{2+\epsilon})$, however, it remained unclear whether…
Topology Optimization (TO), which maximizes structural robustness under material weight constraints, is becoming an essential step for the automatic design of mechanical parts. However, existing TO algorithms use the Finite Element Analysis…
Transformers are state-of-the-art models for a variety of sequence modeling tasks. At their core is an attention function which models pairwise interactions between the inputs at every timestep. While attention is powerful, it does not…
We study the $(1:s+1)$ success rule for controlling the population size of the $(1,\lambda)$-EA. It was shown by Hevia Fajardo and Sudholt that this parameter control mechanism can run into problems for large $s$ if the fitness landscape is…
When a problem instance is perturbed by a small modification, one would hope to find a good solution for the new instance by building on a known good solution for the previous one. Via a rigorous mathematical analysis, we show that…
Despite its popularity, several recent works question the effectiveness of MAML when test tasks are different from training tasks, thus suggesting various task-conditioned methodology to improve the initialization. Instead of searching for…
In the last decade remarkable progress has been made in development of suitable proof techniques for analysing randomised search heuristics. The theoretical investigation of these algorithms on classes of functions is essential to the…
We propose a new, flexible approach for dynamically maintaining successful mutation rates in evolutionary algorithms using $k$-bit flip mutations. The algorithm adds successful mutation rates to an archive of promising rates that are…
The so-called Forward-Forward Algorithm (FFA) has recently gained momentum as an alternative to the conventional back-propagation algorithm for neural network learning, yielding competitive performance across various modeling tasks. By…
Recent works showed that simple success-based rules for self-adjusting parameters in evolutionary algorithms (EAs) can match or outperform the best fixed parameters on discrete problems. Non-elitism in a (1,$\lambda$) EA combined with a…
Not all generate-and-test search algorithms are created equal. Bayesian Optimization (BO) invests a lot of computation time to generate the candidate solution that best balances the predicted value and the uncertainty given all previous…
Most evolutionary algorithms (EAs) used in practice employ crossover. In contrast, only for few and mostly artificial examples a runtime advantage from crossover could be proven with mathematical means. The most convincing such result shows…